Auto Focus
Actor Bob Crane (Greg Kinnear), who gained his stardom from six seasons of the TV show
Hogan’s Hereos, looks like a nice fella. He has got a wife and couple of cute kids, and
he may neglect them a bit once and a while, and he may be hiding a couple dirty magazines in the garage, but overall he treats them right and is an all around standup guy. But then there is a strange meeting at the crossroads when Crane’s newfound fame in the TV series crashes into audio/visual technician John Carpenter (Willem Dafoe). Crane admits to be somewhat of a photography nut and Carpenter talks him into going to a strip club to tell him about the new top of the line home video cameras he’s selling. And here the three forces meet and meld, Crane’s fame and slight sexual deviance and Carpy’s high tech video equipment. Within no time Bob Crane is on the prowl, luring women back to Carpy’s pad and photographing and filming them all doing some very dirty stuff. As time goes by Crane’s wife gets suspicious,
Hogan’s Heroes goes off the air, Crane remarries, Bob and John’s relationship gets strained, and bit farther down the road Bob Crane turns winds up an unsolved Hollywood murder victim.
Paul Schrader’s oddly titled
Auto Focus is a toughie to categorize, as it is certainly not a biopic of Crane’s life,
nor a deep exploration of how a couple of Hogan’s dirty pictures turned into reels of self-made pornography, nor is it a story of how some techno junkie corrupted famous actor Bob Crane into being a sex addict. The film’s most obvious and interesting thread is the subtle chronicling of the rise of home video technology. While Crane is hunting down jobs in dinner theater or courting a new woman screenwriter Michael Gerbosi slyly makes Carpenter an obsessive video techno junkie who always keeps up on the latest. So as Bob Crane gently crumbles both as a celebrity and a person, behind the scenes is the increasing availability of home video. At the beginning of the film Carpenter’s bulky new cameras and reel-to-reel play back units at top of the line and he personally goes around selling them to celebrities. Towards the end, in the late 70s, he laments on just how easy it is for “anyone” to walk into a store and buy a video camera for themselves.
For a movie that does very little to help explore a celebrity’s unique sexual addiction, the paralleling courses of Crane’s downfall due to his sex obsessed image and the ability of the average Joe to buy and use top of the line home video technology does not seem accidental. Though both Kinnear and Dafoe perform their roles admirably,
Auto Focus offers no interpretations on what drives Crane and Carpenter to be sex media junkies. It is vaguely ironic that their “hobby” of creating pornography seems special because they have the access and the money to fund such highly technological whims, and when it comes time that just about anyone with a couple bucks could do the same thing the success of Crane and Carpy’s once unique hobby disintegrates. Perhaps the title
Auto Focus speaks towards the public’s need to automatically
focus on what makes a celebrity a sex addict instead of understanding the person as a whole.
Auto Focus does open Crane up a bit, showing glimpses of a religion, of his kids and a twisted fantasy sequence where all at once Hogan’s Hereos, Crane’s family and his sexual addiction are all thrown together into some kind of picture of what’s going on inside the man. The film certainly gives no easy answers to Crane’s career downfall or root behind his sexual addiction but the problem is the film does not appear to give any kind of answer or interpretation. Or perhaps the title speaks towards the ease of consumerability that comes with the increase of technology, for example manual cameras required a semi-technical knowledge of photography that point-and-shoot automatically focusing lenses completely eliminated. The link between Crane and the advances in photographical technologies is a tough one to connect, and a murky line between celebrity downfall (or celebrity eccentricities) and the rise of VHS and the home video market might lurk around
Auto Focus in a place that a single viewing did not find.
It is a shame that
Auto Focus’s themes are so veiled because it is a very sumptuous production for such a small film. Kinnear does his finest work here and Schrader uses a surprisingly large amount of hand held camera work during the later part of the film, Crane’s downfall essentially, which is paired with a typical but none-the-less atmospheric score by Lynch favorite Angelo Badalamenti. The sets and costuming too are rich and lovingly illustrate a subtle passing of time from the mid sixties to the late seventies. In fact, to look at, especially with Dafoe and Kinnear’s unusual relationship together as Crane and Carpy,
Auto Focus puts a lot up on the screen. But with a not so ironic lack of focus, too many unanswered questions, murky technological allusions and a running time that is thirty minutes too long the movie never seems to choose a direction and get moving.
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