“Freud’s ultimate impulse, the reason why he did all his creative work, was to get laid –– which is ultimately a highly creative act.”
That’s a quote from Nick Nolte, pulled from Nick Nolte: No Exit, Tom Thurman’s experimental, quasi-existential documentary on the actor, his inner life, and his somewhat incredible journey from one dubious achievement to another: first PEOPLE Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive, then, just ten years later, star of the most mockable celebrity mug shot in recent history. (It’s the latter achievement that seems to give Nolte greater pleasure––the mug shot is prominently displayed in a laugh-out-loud bizarre flash intro on his official website.)
The nature of the quote––its balance between absurdity and plausibility, its revision of history through the lens of impulse––makes it seem like it just as well could have been housed by Abel Ferrara’s Chelsea on the Rocks, the other film I saw on my last day of screenings in Cannes. In addition to sharing an interest in the relationship between excess and art, both films offer us stories presented through the eyes of older men of some notoriety, offering dispatches from a space on the dividing line between mainstream celebrity culture and a tangetial space––dirtier, less stable, less a sub-culture than an afterworld.
Chelsea on the Rocks marks Abel Ferrara’s return to New York filmmaking after living for several years in self-imposed exile in Italy. During this period abroad, he’s been able to enjoy certain spoils––a steady stream of foreign investment capitol, access to name actors––but his films have gone virtually unseen in the U.S. outside of festivals. Chelsea’s story of the Hotel’s transition from bohemian Mecca to wannabe luxury hotspot may only interest gentrification fetishists, but there’s enough candid confession here from semi-celebrities (Dennis Hopper, Milos Forman, Ethan Hawke) to possibly break through to a wider audience.
In order to make the doc, his first non-fiction feature, Ferrara and crew moved into a residence at the Chelsea for four months, making Chelsea’s story of the forced dispersion of a community of outsiders into a personal one. Showing no real interest in tradition documentary practice (and thank god for that), Ferrara conducts each interview like a conversation––which means he often interrupts his subject, stumbles into the frame, or punctuates someone else’s recollection with a well-placed “Oh shit.” It might be the boldfaced names that are going to sell the thing, but the best material here, the spots where Ferrara seems most comfortable, involve the usually drug-related shock-horror stories of relative nobodies.
The problem is not that there’s too much Abel in Chelsea––if anything, the problem is that there’s not enough. “I’m living here, and it’s killing me,” he tells Ethan Hawke early on, but never elaborates on his own experiences at the hotel. We can make an educated guess as to why not. One resident of the hotel describes the hotel as “standing on a vortex, a very powerful vortex,” and based on the bulk of the testimony from current and former residents, this seems to be code for, “Everybody here does a lot of drugs.” Though Ferrara has never been exactly shy about his inclination for indulgence (he presided over the 11am Chelsea press conference in Cannes with a Budweiser can in hand), he’s not about to directly implicate himself in the madness around him here.
More direct personal testimony from Ferrara could have opened the vortex-like nature of the film itself. Instead, Ferrara breaks up the interviews with laughably cheap-looking reenactments, one starring Bijou Phillips as Nancy Spungeon and Adam Goldberg as a malicious drug dealer, another featuring Grace Jones as a sympathetic resident and Ferrara’s young girlfriend Shannyn Leigh as Janis Joplin. Thought I do sort of think there’s something charming (if totally sleazy) about the way Ferrara insists on giving Leigh something to do, she is far, far out of her depth. The reenactments cheapen what might otherwise have been a bittersweet document; as it is, it’s an extraordinarily entertaining but not totally satisfying mess.
As claustrophobic as Chelsea but for entirely different reasons, No Exit, which screened in the Cannes market (Anthony Kaufman covered Thurman’s plight self-representation strategy for Variety), runs on a fairly gonzo gimmick: A relatively clean-cut Nolte (cleaned up in a white hat and jacket, voice strong and eyes clear) “interviews” a second Nolte, one much more closely resembling the common impression of the Rich Man, Poor Man star’s late-in-life descent into some brand of madness (or, at least, hygienic disarray): bright red face, hair thin and greasy, raspy voice huffing out pronouncements as if it’s a struggle just to get enough breath.
Clean Nolte asks Dirty Nolte the tough questions––about drugs, women, the mug shot––most of which Dirty Nolte declines to answer directly. Instead, he offers up an endless stream of ruminative pullquotes. Talking head interviews with friends and former co-workers, including Paul Mazursky, Jacqueline Bissett and Ben Stiller (whose Tropic Thunder offers Nolte his highest-profile role in awhile), offer a perspective from outside the Nolte headspace, which is much needed. As Mazursky puts it, “He’s got about 7 people working in there already.” Hell is other people, indeed.
Perhaps predictably, a little of this goes a long way. As it is, the film looks like 90s video art, which is to say that, in addition to its cheapish video patina, it defies general conventions of narrative pacing and flow. It’s hard to imagine a film that looks like this getting a theatrical release––but then, after spending an hour and a half in the world of Dirty Nolte, the idea that this actor could be functional enough within the Hollywood system to star in a big-budget action comedy is almost as unimaginable. Never say never, I guess.
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