Nominated for multiple awards, Affliction won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar® for James Coburn and the Best Actor for Nick Nolte from both the New York Film Critics Circle Awards and the National Society of Film Critics, USA. Before watching the film, I was worried that all the hype surrounding Coburn and Nolte was due to the fact that this was an actor’s movie — made for displaying acting chops in a two-hour vanity piece. I stand corrected. While it is true that the performances are absolutely powerful, the film stands on its own as a study into the mind of men.

Schrader doesn’t cast all men as bad or terrible people. He just focuses on some of them. Set in snow-covered New Hampshire, the film centers around Nolte’s character, Wade Whitehouse, a town worker (plowing snow, etc,) and part-time police officer. Wade is a hard, grizzled sort who longs to have his young daughter enjoy herself when she visits her daddy and not wait impatiently to return to her mother as soon as she gets into town. He also drinks, smokes, and thinks too much. Having stayed in this small town all his life, Wade developed a sad tunnel-vision-like syndrome. All he knows is what he does and where he is. To be sure, he isn’t like his younger brother Rolfe (Schrader regular, Willem Dafoe), who managed to escape and become a college professor hours away, and he hopes he isn’t anything like his father.

Coburn plays Glen, Wade and Rolfe’s father. We first meet this horror of a man in flashbacks that are a mixture of Wade’s childhood memory and stories that he’s heard about his old man. Glen is an abusive alcoholic who wants his two “girlie-boys” to become “real men.” Hard work and good beatings (mainly to Wade) are, he thinks, the way for them to get there.

Wade, while hating his father, is slowly becoming eerily similar to him. Sissy Spacek (back in top form) plays Margie Fogg, Wade’s girlfriend. She is extremely understanding about his quirks and shortcomings but sees the gradual change and slow descent in Wade, especially when Wade has to move in with his father to care for him.

Wade is keeping himself busy. Convinced that a hunting accident was more than just an accident, he proceeds to make life very difficult for himself in this little hamlet. When not clutching his aching jaw from a bad tooth, he’s at work burning bridges behind him.

While Coburn does a wonderful job at being an absolute creep of a human being, it is Nolte who shines through in this performance. When Nolte was drinking, or in pain, or cold, I could feel it. He’s developed into a tremendous talent who can convey pain like so few can these days on the silver screen. He’s getting better with age.

This isn’t a typical film, or an easy one at that. The rage and turmoil that often exist between fathers and sons is a powerful dramatic force. Last month, I was pleasantly surprised by the great father/son relationship in Rushmore. This month, I am mortified.

Usually, right about this point, a movie such as this could descend into typical cheap throwaway scenes made for milking laughs, but Russell manages to find heart in all of these characters and still keep the comedy pacing and timing. At the top of their game are Lily Tomlin and Alan Alda, playing artist hippie leftovers from the ’60s who seem to have suffered some interesting and hilarious side effects from their years of drug abuse and law evasion. Their functionally dysfunctional family scenes are worthy of multiple viewings.