Ironweed

In Ironweed, a ragpicker surveys the wreckage of Francis Phelan, ex-ballpayer, wayward family man, and drifting down-and-outer. The ragpicker sums up Francis with two choice words: “Sensitive bum.”

That puts it about right: Francis Phelan is a tortured, soulful tramp. The suffering stumblebum is the hero of Ironweed, based on William Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Kennedy also wrote the screenplay.

The film version, directed by Hector Babenco (Kiss of the Spider Woman), takes Francis (Jack Nicholson) through approximately 48 hours of traumatic life on Halloween and All Soul’s Day 1938. Francis wanders the streets of Albany, N.Y., touching briefly with most of the people in his orbit, while impressionistically “seeing” events from his past.

His desperate search is sparked by a visit to the cemetery, where he’s landed a day’s wages digging graves. He sees the grave of his baby son, a child who was accidentally dropped and killed by Francis some 22 years before. It was then that Francis left his family and began the slow, bummy process of self-destruction.

Francis staggers from one companion to another: a friendly fellow bum (singer Tom Waits), who’s just learned he’s contracted cancer (“First thing I ever got!”); an old-pal bartender (Fred Gwynne); and especially Francis’s woman friend, Helen (Meryl Streep), a former singer and current schizophrenic who has kept dissolute company with him for nine years.

All of which leads to Francis’s return to the home of his ex-wife (Carroll Baker), where his son and daughter (Michael O’Keefe, Diane Venora) have different reactions to his reappearance after many years.

Meryl Streep is uncomfortably accurate in her edgy depiction of a gone character, and some of the byplay between Streep and Nicholson is tenderly pathetic. But hers is a supporting role; this is truly Nicholson’s movie, and he is quite affecting. His scene at his son’s grave, in a terrible bright sunlight, is beautiful. But is the film up to his standards?

I don’t think so. Kennedy’s script contains some heart-wrenchingly authentic turns of phrase, such as the moment Francis thanks his ex-wife for never telling anyone about the circumstances of the baby’s death: “Thanks don’t come close to touchin’ somethin’ like that.”  But Kennedy’s script is the work of a superb writer who doesn’t quite grasp the singular flow of movies; the film’s rhythm is all wrong, the scenes dally and meander.

Babenco, too misses something. Hiring a foreign eye to interpret the material (Babenco is Argentine-born) is a worthy try at catching a universal theme, but the deeply American flavor of the piece is absent. Without that, without the feel of the soil and the smell of the soup kitchen, Ironweed is oddly ungrounded.

First published in The Herald, February 11, 1988

The cast includes Ted Levine, Nathan Lane (his first big-screen role), Margaret Whitton, and Frank Whaley as the young Francis. I have never revisited this movie, but would be game to just to watch Nicholson again. Babenco, who burst into prominence with Pixote, would have one more big-canvas, Hollywood-level movie, At Play in the Fields of the Lord, an odd but rather interesting film; he died in 2016.