This blog entry is part of my “movie year countdown”. To read more about that check out my first Spout filmblog entry.
Hardcore
This movie hits home. And I mean fairly literally.
Since Spout is based in Grand Rapids and has many users from Calvin College or who grew up in families from the Dutch Christian Reformed tradition, there may be many people on this site who could feel the same.
Although this movie was released a few years before I was born, to see so many opening shots of Grand Rapids, and see and hear places like Zeeland and Grand Valley State University named, and hearing a list of last names the jumps right from the De- to the Van-, and to see this big Dutch family getting together at Christmas time made me instantly feel like this movie was more real than any movie I had ever seen before. Almost dangerously real.
I'm not sure where George C. Scott got it. Maybe Paul Schrader was somehow able to convey exactly what the character of Jake VanDorn was to Scott (although I heard rumors that Scott didn't get along at all with Schrader during the movie and thought he was a horrible director). But somehow Scott pulls off a Western Michigan Dutch patriarch that I have come to recognize almost perfectly. Maybe this was a part of Scott the whole time and it was just a matter of casting. But every movie I've seen him in that was filmed before Hardcore (although that isn't too many) he is a boisterous with little constraint. Here we get the proud and dutiful working man of God. Subdued emotions. Slow to react, but with strong resolve when he does. An honestly caring man who doesn't always know how to show it.
I also three years ago moved from the Grand Rapids area to Chicago. I'm sure LA is quite different in many ways, but the contrast between these two environments in the movie is something I could connect with as well.
What's different about Hardcore is that you rarely see a character like VanDorn as the protagonist or even the hero in movies, especially not Hollywood movies. Religious father figures like that are usually made to look like jerks or buffoons. Here we see a man of that description who has more compassion and awareness than is usually given credited for. He may not always be able to always understand or empathize with the characters he meets in LA but we can see that sometimes that not having that experience is a better life.
What I see is a man who loves his daughter and always has. He has in his mind loved her the best way he can, and has never explicitly done anything to hurt or abuse her. But there can be something very slowly and subliminally damaging about families where emotions are repressed. And they may not even realized they are being repressed because it is just a part of their family history and culture. I know this can be prevalent in the Dutch Christian Reformed community I have seen in Western Michigan. And it is incredibly difficult to say that because you feel like you are saying that people don't love each other, but they do very much. They just don't realize that they aren't showing it. To show it in ways that are needed feels very weird. (This is not to say that these things only happen in religious communities. Certainly it often DOESN'T happen in religious communities, and it can often happen ANYWHERE). And although I have maybe not seen an example as extreme as an apparently happy looking young girl suddenly running off to join the pornography industry, I have seen many things in that vein. She was looking for for certain expressions of love and didn't find it at home. So she looked to the world of open sex for a physical sort of substitute for love. But of course that is even less fulfilling.
I do find it also interesting that there is even an extended scene where VanDorn talks about some of the doctrine associated with his denomination. I can't think of many other movies that would just have a scene of someone discussing that at all, much less for a relatively obscure denomination like the Christian Reformed Church. I'm not sure exactly how a scene like that comes off to different viewers. It's obvious that Niki doesn't get what he's talking about, and honestly I don't know if I do either. But why or how could she? But he believes in something. What does she believe in?
Peter Boyle is fantastic too.
Rating: 10/10