To fans of TV Land, Bob Crane was Hogan, the lovable POW in the popular TV series Hogan’s Heroes. To fans of the E! True Hollywood Story, he was a philandering husband whose obsession with homemade pornography lead to his murder in 1978, allegedly at the hands of his friend and partner in sleaze. It is a subject that has all of the scandalous details that makes any Hollywood execu-tive’s mouth water and is too easy to resist turning into a glorious fest of sex and melodrama. Instead of taking that route, director Paul Schrader’s film Auto Focus is an interesting and artistic profile of Robert Crane, man who loses his touch with reality and falls into his own personal hell of addiction and debauchery.
At the beginning of Auto Focus, Bob Crane (Greg Kinnear) is an all-American family man from the innocent early ’60’s who has just been given the star role in Hogan’s Heroes. Then he meets John Carpenter (Willem Dafoe), the representative of an electronics company who introduces him to the new technology of video recording and the wonderful world of strip clubs and one-night stands. He goes from being an American icon lauded by Christian magazines to a recluse who spends his waking hours having sex, videotaping it, and watching the tapes with Carpenter. When he realizes his life is in turmoil, he tries to end his old habits by ending his destructive friendship, a decision that costs him his life.
Auto Focus runs like a series of dreamy vignettes that document Crane’s downfall. The dialogue and action is placid and threatens to become dull on numerous occasions, but it better serves the atmosphere of the film. The film’s plot and atmosphere is like a submarine that gradually plunges from the bright surface to suffocating depths. In the beginning, Bob is on a surface filled with bright lights, happy music, and snappy dialogue. As his situation becomes worse, the lighting, music, action, and dialogue become slower, darker, and more disturbing. The real world is light, while his shadowy world of sex and videotape is dark. As the film progresses, there are fewer lighter scenes and the plot immerses itself into this shadowy realm until the bottom is hit like a tripod against our hero’s head. The atmosphere is completely surreal and illustrates the psychological state of a man controlled by his obsessions.
Greg Kinnear gracefully plays Crane as a gee-whiz dad in one scene and a sleazy pornographer in the next and makes all of them work together as the same person. Dafoe is perfect as Carpenter, a sleazy businessman whose resembles a drug dealer who becomes obsessed with his client: neither of them can get enough, so he must provide the stuff to keep them both happy. There are plenty of sex scenes that run into the territory of soft-core porn and tip-toe into the territory of gratuitousness before pulling back.
The DVD contains deleted scenes, a “making-of” documentary, and a 40 minute documentary of Robert Crane’s murder and its investigation. Auto Focus is a haunting portrait of a person consumed by his desires and how they bring him to ruin. It is a Hollywood scandal story that does more than spew sleazy details and closely examines the disturbing reality behind them.