Leonard himself says that Touch is simply about "accepting what is. Abiding with the facts. Nothing more"--which sounds a lot like the "serenity prayer" taught in detox. (Juvenal works at an alcoholic-rehab center.) Touch is a homily badly disguised as a comedy--a change of pace that meant more to the author than it did to most of his readers.
Leonard explained in his introduction to the first edition that he wrote the book in 1977. More than a dozen publishers rejected it. Only after Leonard became a brand name was he able to get Touch into print, in 1987; he did no significant rewriting, though he said that he would have updated the topical references if he had rewritten it.
That's pretty much all that writer/director Paul Schrader has done here--a gag in the book that involves Frank Sinatra Jr. now concerns LL Cool J. But updating is trickier than playing fill-in-the-blanks. A contemporary film spotted with stigmatic's blood cries out for more references to AIDS than a single tasteless joke. And who would have thought that having a sleaze-joint dancer compare Juvenal's power to George Lucas' Force would still have currency in 1997? Unless I missed a throwaway line, apparently not Schrader.
Shifting the novel's setting from Detroit to Los Angeles swiftly turns problematic: The story loses whatever real, local roots it had in the Midwest's up-from-the-South fundamentalism and rock-ribbed Catholicism. The film's locations are deliberately denatured and drab; you get the idea that if the camera shifted an inch in either direction you'd spot the water tower on the Burbank lot. Having already pulled off a spiritual odyssey in his unrecognized masterwork Light Sleeper, Schrader chooses to emphasize the slapstick-grifter aspects of Leonard's novel. The director's notion is that Middle America has grown so bland and listless that it aspires to talk-showhood. But that thrust is as old as the (Hollywood) hills, as are the jabs at journalistic hustling (with Janeane Garofalo as a newspaper reporter on the make) and tabloid TV. Still, what's mainly wrong with the movie is, well, the book.
Ulrich aside (he's like Johnny Depp lite), the cast ranges from agreeable to engaging, with Walken doing one of his prime impersonations of superficial rationality at work within a hustler's dementia. And there are moments when Schrader's preoccupations merge uproariously with Leonard's, particularly in a fantasy done in the "dignified" manner of a Sunday-school slide show, picturing Tom Arnold as a martyred Christian saint.
But in the end, all that holds the story together is Juvenal making his way through 20th-century Stations of the Cross: fame, exploitation, bad (and good) publicity, and attack TV. And though Schrader and Leonard may think it's daring to give a saint a sex drive and let him live happily ever after, Juvenal is a bore. At one point, he tells Fonda that she thinks he's telepathic because he's a good listener. When she washed the stigmata stains off his and her laundry, I was afraid he'd tell her that cleanliness was next to godliness.
Touch
Directed by Paul Schrader.
Rated
