Charles "I'd Rather Be Reading" Bukowski is fated to live on as a bumper sticker as well as a writer. He's one of those icons whose image perpetually threatens to dwarf his creative output; his life and art are so entwined that pretty much every Bukowski adaptation becomes an extended meditation on American literature's resident bard of the barstool.
So one of the more striking aspects of Bent Hamer's wily adaptation of Bukowski's Factotum is the way it undercuts the seedy glamour of the author's cult even as it reinforces it. Matt Dillon plays the film's resident Bukowski surrogate, a laconic man with the defensive body language of someone always bracing for disappointments and humiliations lurking just around the corner. Not much happens: In a series of episodic encounters, Dillon grudgingly, dispiritedly stumbles into and out of dead-end jobs and equally futureless relationships. These stories are so disconnected that they intermittently resemble short films edited together.
In a medium generally about action and momentum, Factotum is largely concerned with inaction and inertia. Hamer (Kitchen Stories) uses slow, deliberate pacing and minimalist camera movements match the languid rhythms of boozy drifters content to lurch from bender to bender without much concern for a future that might not even exist. Factotum works best as a beyond-bone-dry comedy in the Aki Kaurismäki vein. The scenes of Dillon fucking up one soul-crushing job after another, seemingly in slow motion, wittily capture the drudgery of manual labor. And if nothing else, the film justifies itself via the David Lynch-like sound design of Dillon's cleaning gig at The New York Times, where his literary ambitions stand in tragic relief against the go-nowhere emptiness of his current existence. Still, Dillon's frequent narration is long-winded, full of boozy philosophizing and overwrought phrasing and Factotum is at its weakest when it abandons the squalid comedy of the mundane and slouches toward lyricism and transcendence. It's better off not doing much of anything.