Novelist Russell Banks, the author of "Continental Drift" and "The Sweet Hereafter," is a specialist in the bruised, violent male psyche, and he couldn't have found a more ideal interpreter to bring Affliction to the screen than writer-director Paul Schrader, the screenwriter who dreamed up "Taxi Driver's" Travis Bickle. Wade Whitehouse (Nick Nolte), the protagonist of this ferociously bleak film, is a part-time cop and divorced dad in a working-class New Hampshire town. Angry, hard-drinking, resentful of his daughter's preference for his ex-wife, Wade tries to be a good man but his rage keeps getting in the way. The violence inside him is bred in the bone, beaten into him by an alcoholic father (James Coburn) who still taunts him as if he were a child.
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