"Auto Focus"

"Auto Focus" is a deeply moral movie, which is not to say it's a moralistic one. The press surrounding the picture has reminded us that Schrader was raised a Calvinist -- he never even saw a movie until he was in his late teens. I'm not really sure that Schrader's background is more relevant to this movie than it is to any other. But what makes him such an interesting filmmaker (and if he's sometimes not a very good one, at other times he's remarkable) is that in most of his movies, particularly those made in the past 10 years or so, no immoral or misguided act goes unnoticed.

But Schrader does exactly the opposite of judging his characters. Instead, he watches them through the camera lens not with detachment but with so much attuned sympathy that he seems to feel a kind of helplessness; whether we're talking about Patty Hearst locked in a closet by her captors, or the long-suffering Joseph Fiennes character in the marvelous but little-seen 1999 picture "Forever Mine," when I watch a Schrader movie I often sense his inability to step in and fix things for his characters as if it were a spectral presence. (I notice it less, of course, in the movies that Schrader has only written, like "Taxi Driver," which suggests that it's a distinctive quality that comes out only in his filmmaking.)

Maybe that's why the first half of "Auto Focus" is so affecting -- you can feel Schrader looking through that lens every minute. But in the movie's last hour or so, things start to feel more automatic and calculated; we realize that what we've got here is a fairly typical treatise on the price of fame and celebrity, and not much more. At the point where Crane is really sliding into decline -- it's the mid-'70s, he's been doing dinner theater for years, his second marriage is falling apart, and despite how unsalable he is, he's begging his agent to find him some decent work -- Schrader switches to grainier film stock and bled-dry colors; the camerawork is shakier, and there are more inexplicable tight close-ups. It's a marked switch from the candyland colors of the earliest sections of the movie, and it feels facile and gimmicky. You wouldn't expect a seasoned filmmaker like Schrader to go for such thumpingly obvious effects.

And considering how sensitively calibrated Kinnear's performance is, you don't need him to. Crane knew that his big selling point, as a human being and as a commodity, was his likability. Kinnear riffs on that without milking it. You know when he's turning the charm on full-blast, as he does when, in a mid-'70s scene, he surreptitiously asks a bartender to switch the bar TV to the channel that's playing "Hogan's Heroes," then acts surprised when a comely maiden sidles up to him for an autograph. Kinnear pulls off the trick of making Crane seem genuinely likable and not just unctuous. You notice it particularly in the early scenes, like the one in which Kinnear, just getting used to his TV celebrity, is delighted to have the chance to sit in on drums with the house band at a strip club. The way he perches behind the kit, grinning as he sets the beat for a run-of-the-mill bump-and-grind routine, tells you everything you need to know about how sincere, and how modest, this guy's early dreams were.

The memory of those early scenes stick with us when, later in the movie, we see a much more dissolute and washed-up Crane sitting splay-legged in a dismal basement rec room furnished with fake hardwood and pilly, saggy tweed furniture. Carpenter has dropped by to visit, bringing with him a tape of some recent exploits; he pops the tape in the VCR and before long he and Crane, bored and horny, begin to idly play with themselves in front of the flickering image. There's nothing shocking about the scene. (The movie has already hinted at Carpenter's submerged homoerotic attraction to Crane.) In fact, what's shocking about it is how languid it is; it's the perfect representation of frisky sexual obsession turned into dopey underwater ballet.

But Kinnear holds you every minute. He's a great mimic, nailing down Crane's hyperstylized "Hogan's Heroes" mannerisms perfectly. But in the end, he pulls off the far trickier feat of making us feel extraordinary sympathy for a character who has sunk too low even for our pity. The real Bob Crane was a mere footnote in the world of '60s actors; why would we be interested in him at all if not for his sensationalistic death and bizarre pornographic legacy?

The answer is, we wouldn't. And yet Kinnear plays Crane as if that thought had never occurred to him. He forges through "Auto Focus" with utmost faith that we will care -- and somehow we do. His performance has to be one of the most sympathetic acts of decency one actor has ever extended to another. Crane always wanted to be a real, respectable movie actor. Channeled through Kinnear, he finally gets his wish.

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