Review of Bukowski: Born Into This (2003) by V H — 19 Jul 2004

Before I saw this film, I'd never even heard of Charles Bukowski. Bukowski was a hard-drinking poet and novelist who died in 1994 at the age of 73. For most of his career, he paid his bills by doing a series of odd jobs, including a 14-year stint at the post office. When a publisher friend offered him a stipend of $100 per month to quit his job and write full time, Bukowski churned out his first novel, "Post Office", in only three weeks and never looked back. Being a mere semi-literate movie fan, the only work by Bukowski which I've ever even heard of is the screenplay for the film "Barfly", which was loosely based on his own life (and which I recall finding agonizing to watch).

This documentary consists mainly of old footage of Bukowski from the 70's pieced together with more recent interviews with his old friends and ex-wives and girlfriends giving their impressions of the guy. Bukowski is a pretty scary looking fellow with a face that was ravaged by severe acne as a teenager. Some of his old girlfriends are even scarier; one sports a fluffy white beard! In addition to his old chums, some famous people like Bono, Tom Waits, and Sean Penn weigh in, claiming to be huge fans or pals or both. As if this is supposed to matter to us.

I wasn't all that wild about Bukowski, at least at first. He was often drunk and nasty and in one almost unwatchable sequence, was quite abusive to his wife. But as the film went on, it revealed that his tough exterior belied a surprisingly sensitive core, and did a good job of explaining how he came to be the way he came to be.

But more importantly for me, it exposed me to Bukowski's poetry, and I discovered that I could relate to it in a way I've never related to any poetry I've heard before. Heck, I don't even really LIKE poetry, not counting my brief, yet fervent obsession with double-dactyls, whose rigidly defined structures appeal to my sense of symmetry and order, regardless of their content. But the free-flowing non-rhyming touchy-feely unstructured hippy-dippy crap about love and nature...blech.

There was a clip of Bukowski, drunk, at a poetry reading in San Francisco where he ranted at the audience a bit, then read this:

Oh, yes.

There are worse things than.

Being alone.

But it often takes decades.

To realize this.

And most often.

When you do.

It's too late.

And there's nothing worse.

Than.

Too late.

And I thought, wow, I really like that. I think it's my favorite non-dactyl poem ever. And then when I came home from the theatre, I looked up Bukowski on the internet and read more of his stuff and I liked that too. And then I went to Amazon and bought one of his books. And then to get super-saver shipping, I bought another. And then I started thinking about trying to write more stuff myself, I mean beyond movie reviews and emails.

So did this movie have such a profound effect on me because it's a great film or because I'm a sucker for stories about disenfranchised, alienated misanthropes? Probabaly the latter, I'm guessing. But too bad. It's my review so I give it an 8.