excalibur212 Review of Affliction

Affliction (1997)

The worst "affliction" is watching this entire thing from beginning to end...

[1/10 · 25 May 2008]

This piece of sloth won an Oscar? You've got to be kidding me. This is perhaps the most slow moving, boring, uneventful "drama" I've ever watched. You kept waiting for something to happen, and nothing did. Half the time you couldn't even make out the dialogue (I think Nolte was drunk or stoned in real life as he mumbled through the script; and, no, I don't think it was intentional). There's a toothache, a murder, a divorce....and why do I care? This movie struggles trying to decide what to be. Is it a murder mystery? A drama? Or just a pointless waste of time? Mostly the latter. The ending made absolutely no sense at all and was completely unfulfilling to the script and the audience. The expected gradual buildup one anticipated was completely absent...there is no "descent into madness" or anything like that. It is more like 2 hours of nothing, horribly drawn out, followed by about 5 minutes of a series of events that should have been the climax, mostly reduced to flashback and 3rd party offscreen narration! (And bad narration, I might add - Willem Dafoe might be a great actor, but he should never be allowed to read/narrate a film again. He sounds like he's reading out of a book.) I understand the deeper intent, but the execution was pathetic. I would not curse sitting through this entire film again on anyone. There are much better movies out there to deal with substance abuse and violence...this is not one of them. Mostly it's just a bunch of exposition and wasted time. Quite an affliction on the viewer indeed!