As Carter Page III, the title character in Paul Schrader's latest brooding portrait of solitary manhood, Woody Harrelson doesn't walk the corridors of power so much as he sashays down them. It's a bold if sometimes shaky performance, heavy on the julep-inflected accent and queeny mannerisms; it's also the first time since The People vs. Larry Flynt, over a decade ago now, that Harrelson, an underrated actor, has really taken command of the screen. Though Carter's father was a much-beloved senator who made a name for himself during the Watergate hearings, his openly gay son has eschewed politics, finding a measure of superficial happiness as a "walker" — a chaste, catty companion to various D.C. wives (played by Lauren Bacall, Lily Tomlin and Kristin Scott Thomas) whose powerful husbands are too busy (or just too bored) to escort them to the opera or sit around on a lazy afternoon playing canasta.
Of course, there's only so much gossip and canasta a viewer can take. Or so Schrader clearly assumes, since he quickly introduces a tedious thriller plot in which Carter gallantly attempts to shield one of his walkees after she stumbles upon the bloody corpse of her lobbyist lover. What might have been a first-rate character study — there's a terrific early shot of Carter staring into his bedroom mirror as he removes his expensive toupee, his expression at once rueful and defiant — instead devolves into a routine morass of Beltway intrigue. Hounded by blowhard police detectives and ambitious politicos, chased by hired assassins down moonlit streets, saddled with a thoroughly unconvincing Turkish-German paparazzo boyfriend (Moritz Bleibtreu), poor Carter has to juggle so much narrative nonsense that his fundamental loneliness, along with his slowly dawning realization of his expendability in the heavily mascared eyes of the ladies he loves, winds up getting short shrift. — Mike D'Angelo