Friday, November 01, 2002
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

MOVIE REVIEW: In Plain View

'Auto Focus' manages to show sleazy side of actor Bob Crane without sinking into squalor

As astounding as it sounds, Bob Crane was a visionary.

Nobody realized it at the time, of course. Especially not him.

In his view, Bob Crane saw himself as "normal" -- a red-blooded, all-American male for whom sex was always the question. (And "yes" was always the answer.)

To many, however, he was a smarmy lowlife with excessive carnal appetites and an obsessive need to expose them to whatever audience he could find. That Crane happened to be famous, thanks to TV-sitcom stardom, just made it easier to score.

These days, of course, Crane wouldn't need "Hogan's Heroes" to launch his TV career.

Not with "The Osbournes" and "The Real World" and "Big Brother" and "The Anna Nicole Show," to cite but a few guilty wallows illustrating the prominent place video voyeurism enjoys in contemporary popular culture. (And we use the term "culture" loosely.)

Which brings us to the essential contradiction inherent in "Auto Focus," Paul Schrader's luridly compelling account of Crane's fatal descent into sleaze.

To put it bluntly: how does a movie depicting such squalid, depressing behavior keep from being squalid and depressing?

Not easily. Yet, somehow, director Paul Schrader manages to stake out the movie's moral quagmire without sinking too far into it.

As both director and screenwriter (often, in the latter role, in collaboration with director Martin Scorsese), Schrader has explored the warped psyches of some of the angriest guys in cinematic history, from "Taxi Driver's" Travis Bickle and "Raging Bull's" Jake LaMotta to such literary antiheroes as "The Mosquito Coast's" Allie Fox (still Harrison Ford's least heroic, most harrowing performance) and "Affliction's" murderous father-son tag team (played by Oscar-winner James Coburn and Oscar-nominee Nick Nolte).

But Crane (played by Greg Kinnear, a former TV fixture himself) lacks that intense inner ire. He's a lightweight, the kind of perfectly pleasant guy who'd look familiar even if you'd never seen him before.

Before people see Crane, however, they hear him -- spinning tunes and spouting jokes as a popular Los Angeles disc jockey. When his shift's over, he goes home to his loving wife (Rita Wilson) and adorable kiddies, who could star in their own mid-'60s sitcom.

Deep down, however, Crane knows he can be more. More famous, anyway.

At least that's what he keeps telling his sharp but far from heartless agent (played with brittle empathy by Ron Leibman), who one day plunks a script down on his desk, suggesting it's Crane's ticket to the big time.

There's just one problem: it's a World War II prison camp sitcom.

"With the funny Nazis," Crane cracks.

Despite his skepticism, the sitcom turns out to be "Hogan's Heroes," a ratings smash that catapults Crane to instant-recognizability status wherever he goes.

Including the strip clubs he begins to frequent, accompanied by audio-video expert John Carpenter (Willem Dafoe). Carpenter meets Crane through one of his clients, "Hogan's Heroes" co-star Richard Dawson, but promptly moves up the cast roster, appointing himself Crane's loyal sycophant and cruise director.

With Carpenter cheering him on, Crane sits in on the drums at strip clubs. The merry twosome then repairs to Carpenter's wired-for-action bachelor pad, where they frolic with an endless parade of girls -- and record their adventures in Polaroid snapshots and on grainy black-and-white videotape.

Initially, Crane tries to keep his dirty little secret in the basement. Until his first wife, followed by his second (the saucy Maria Bello) leave him, setting the stage for a revolving-door existence that becomes ever more tenuous once "Hogan's Heroes" ships out on rerun patrol.

And that, in turn, leaves Crane floundering to find a day job that can come close to matching his night job for sordid thrills. It also leaves Carpenter desperate to retain his long-running sidekick role in Bob Crane's X-rated odyssey, which ends only when somebody (possibly Carpenter, although he was acquitted of the crime) bashes in his skull with a camera tripod in an Arizona motel room.

Some movies would pay more attention to the crime-and-punishment aspect of this curious case.

Schrader and screenwriter Michael Gerbosi, however, remain far more interested in Crane's life (such as it is), tracking his quest for success in a changing America where image and illusion trump reality -- and where self-delusion reigns, as long as what's on the TV screen makes you look like a star.

Audiences capable of focusing their own eyes, of course, will detect the degradation and desperation that characterize Crane's path to oblivion.

Yet for all the squalor and underlying despair, "Auto Focus" remains sly and fast on its feet. Schrader's not exactly renowned for his subtlety as a director, but here he deftly skips between satire and melodrama, skillfully altering the balance between the two as "Auto Focus" advances from Crane's naughty-hipster '60s heyday to the grungy has-been fringes of the '70s.

Throughout, Kinnear and Dafoe deliver sad, scary and thoroughly persuasive performances. Kinnear's sunny blandness ably conveys the essence of a man who doesn't really have one -- except, of course, when he's in front of an audience, performing in a hit sitcom or homemade porn. And Dafoe, an expert at exploring villainous vulnerability onscreen, captures not only Carpenter's groveling yes-man eagerness but the desperate knowledge that, without Crane, he has nothing.

To quote a golden oldie now making a comeback as a TV commercial jingle, nothing from nothing leaves nothing. Yet "Auto Focus" manages to make something of a nothing life, offering an eerily affecting if sketchy character portrait. After watching "Auto Focus," you won't know Bob Crane. But at least you'll understand why you don't.