Affliction.

The artistic strengths of Affliction, Paul Schrader's soon-to-be-released adaptation of the novel by Russell Banks, are apparent before the film is five minutes underway. Its flaws take a lot longer to kick in but they sure kick hard.

Making Canadian locations impersonate New Hampshire, cinematographer Paul Sarossy and designer Anne Pritchard create a town called Lawford that seems a real place dying a real death. Schrader and his casting directors have populated it with actors who look like recognizable townspeople enduring economic decay with jaundiced calm yielding to murderous depression. The New Republic's Stanley Kauffmann rightly praised the way Sarossy's work on The Sweet Hereafter (another Russell Banks story) conveyed snow's several shades of white. He does the same thing for Affliction, but also recreates the veil of whiteness that hangs in wintry northern air even on clear days. Costumer Francois Laplante captures the quintessential wooliness of life in such a place, with even lovemaking carried on through thick sweaters and shirts and under heavy blankets. Also rendered well is the strange blend of tolerance and contempt males demonstrate toward each other in such a town as they go about filling the few jobs left and taking their pitiful alcoholic pleasures in the sole surviving bar and grill. In a place like Lawford, the epithet "asshole" is just a synonym for human being. Such words tend to lose their scurrility through repetition, and a good thing, too. You can't afford to put some guy through the nearest wall when he's supposed to be working beside you tomorrow. Yet it is precisely the susceptibility of the film's hero to violence that gives the movie's title its meaning.

Affliction is about male pride warped by the dysfunctional family and starved by desperate economics into macho brutality, paranoia, and, ultimately, madness. Battered by his father in childhood, divorced from a wife who lost all respect for him years ago, rarely allowed to visit the daughter he adores, Wade Whitehouse, officially the chief lawman in town but really only a crossing guard and a hired hand for Lawford's only successful businessman, yearns to find and assert his masculinity. He thinks he's found his chance when a visiting rich man is killed in a hunting accident. Linking the death to his own boss (who had bad business dealings with the dead fellow) and imagining a Mafia-style hit, Whitehouse becomes an avenging angel with nothing to avenge.

Nick Nolte is exactly the right actor for this role (and it's not surprising that he became the movie's executive producer) because there is something about wounded machismo that ignites his talent. (His greatest performance, the self-torturing painter in Scorsese's episode of New York Stories, is an unforgettable portrait in this vein.) Here, Nolte's sometimes irritating mixture of gruffness and hysteria is well employed. His face keeps setting in a sad, wry mask as his eyes scout the middle distance for some escape from humiliation. And when he says, "I get to feeling like a whipped dog; someday I'm gonna bite back," you know he means it and you know the bite will be deep.

So far, so real. But there is always a trap waiting for writers and directors in any drama about crescent madness, and that trap is predictability. There is simply nothing dramatic in watching a character slide without impediment into the abyss. An escape hatch must be kept open even if the escape isn't taken. By the midpoint of Affliction, after witnessing Wade's countless economic and emotional problems, and having been exposed by flashbacks to his ruinous childhood, we simply can't imagine any alternative to the catastrophe Whitehouse is heading for. And there isn't any. We may get the feeling that what we're watching isn't really the tragedy Schrader plainly intends but a case history, open and shut. Too briefly open. Irretrievably shut.

(Yes, I know Oedipus was doomed, too. But Oedipus, like many other tragic heroes, asserts his freedom of spirit after undergoing his doom. By the end of Affliction, Wade is just a psychotic wreck. Psychosis is a lamentable state, not a tragic one.)

Another problem: since we're brought so close to a madman-in-the-making, it is important that there be a supporting character whose sanity can both contrast with, and illuminate, the lead's madness. Lear has his Fool, Raskolnikov his Rasumikan. Wade's girlfriend (Sissy Spacek) almost serves that function, but she's at first oblivious to her lover's sickness and later so busy escaping from it that she can't shed any light on it.

The character plainly meant to put Wade in perspective is his brother Rolfe (Willem Dafoe), who both appears in the story and narrates it. But so inconsistent is the script's characterization of him (first Rolfe plants the idea of a murder plot in Wade's mind, then returns for no particular reason to warn his brother away from the idea of an investigation) and so ponderously written is his dialogue that this putatively sane sibling ends up seeming vaguely weird. The relationship between the brothers might have given this movie the stabilizing power it lacks. Having been shielded in childhood by his brother from the father's abuse, Rolfe can now say, "I was never afflicted by that man's violence." To which Wade responds, "That's what you think." Well, was Rolfe afflicted? And is that why he initially egged on his brother into a wrongheaded murder investigation? Is he less Horatio than Iago? Impossible to say since the script doesn't delve. (I haven't read the novel.)

Suppose Rolfe was kept on screen longer, initially helping his brother to investigate, and later, having realized the error, trying to pull Wade back from madness. The dramatic conflict this would have produced, as facts and insanity divided the siblings, would have made Affliction a true tragedy instead of the tract it finally becomes.

Do I sound more like a script doctor than a critic? There's a reason for that. So well shot, edited, directed, and acted is Affliction (and I haven't mentioned the great work done by James Coburn as the grizzly bear of a father, and by Holmes Osborne, who makes the local Croesus both nasty and pathetic), so authentic does it look and so potentially powerful is its story, that I found myself rooting for it even as it disappeared into the black hole of sociology. I never really wanted to criticize it. I wanted to fix it.