Dramatizing the life of a writer is always a tricky business, but Charles Bukowski, who was generally slumped on a barstool whenever he wasn't parked in front of the typewriter, presents more formidable challenges to the filmmaker than your average scribe. Adapted from Bukowski's second novel, which chronicles alter ego Henry Chinaski's attempt to launch an artistic career while negotiating a series of dead-end McJobs, Factotum, directed by the Norwegian filmmaker Bent Hamer (Kitchen Stories), doesn't even try to impose any sort of dramatic structure on its wastrel's picaresque misadventures. Instead, Hamer seems content to establish and sustain a tone of mild drollery, varying the rhythm every so often by introducing a new paramour — Lili Taylor for a quick shot of manic adrenaline, Marisa Tomei when it's time to get blowsy. Mostly, the film just stumbles aimlessly from one deadpan scene to the next, as if thumbing its bulbous drunkard's nose at the very concept of momentum.
You kinda miss that honker onscreen, actually. In a strange way, Bukowski's perpetually amused fatalism seems inextricable from his lumpy, pockmarked features, which makes it hard to accept Chinaski's weary pensées emerging from a face as classically chiseled as Matt Dillon's.
1987's Barfly admittedly romanticized Bukowski to the point where he verged on cuddly, but Mickey Rourke, pretty as he then was, somehow managed to capture something of the man's essence — that heady mixture of indolence, anger, resignation and disgust. Dillon, by contrast, often comes across as merely testy, so that after a while you start to wonder whether starring in this movie isn't itself annoying busywork, just a rung or two up the ladder from mail sorter. Like most such jobs, Factotum itself, while not without its uses and even pleasures, ultimately elicits little more than a noncommittal shrug. — Mike D'Angelo