Carter Page likes to tell his friends: "I'm not naive, I'm superficial.

" His easy,

ingratiating manner is ideal for his vocation, which is to act as the unpaid companion
of rich society ladies as they attend events without their husbands. Quietly gay, he
adores his ladies as friends and sponsors a weekly canasta game for them that turns
into a gossip fest. Paul Schrader's "The Walker" shows him moving smoothly through
Washington, D.C., where his father was a senator who investigated Watergate; his
mild Southern drawl reflects Carter's heritage as the grandson of a tobacco tycoon
and the great-grandson of a slave owner. Apparently supported by an inheritance, he
is content to be well-dressed, witty and good company.

Woody Harrelson, who usually plays much rougher types like the bounty hunter in
"No Country for Old Men," inhabits this character as comfortably as an old shirt. His
Carter is a character but not too much of a character. A star in his circle but in a
supporting role. A man who knows his place and treasures it. Schrader says one
inspiration for the character was Jerry Zipkin, an escort for Nancy Reagan, Pat
Buckley and Betsy Bloomingdale. Women's Wear Daily coined the term "walker" to
describe him, thus identifying a social category.

Truman Capote also comes to mind. Unlike the Richard Gere character in Schrader's
"American Gigolo," he pleasures his women with company, not sex, and loves doing
it.

His three steady "girls," all of a certain age and formidable instincts, are Lynn
Lockner (Kristin Scott Thomas), Abigail Delorean (Lily Tomlin) and Natalie Van
Miter (Lauren Bacall), who observes that the difficulty with marrying a rich man is
that you don't get to have the money, you only get to look at it. Carter is the model of
discretion, so much so that Lynn Lockner, the wife of a senator (Willem Dafoe),
trusts him to drive her to her weekly meetings with a paid male prostitute in
Georgetown. Nobody will recognize his car. He waits outside.

One afternoon, she returns to the car almost immediately, trembling. She has
discovered her lover stabbed to death. She can't report the murder without involving
herself and her husband in scandal. Carter instinctively steps up and takes the hit
like a Southern gentleman: He tells the police he discovered the body, and so
becomes their leading suspect. As Carter looks into the crime, the murky
undergrowth of Washington corruption begins to exude aromas, and Carter involves
his own lover, a young Turk named Emek Yoglu (Moritz Bleibtreu), in their own
investigation to save his skin.

"The Walker" is a quietly enthralling film because it contains the murder and the
investigation within Carter's smooth calm. He has practiced for a lifetime at
concealing his emotions, first no doubt from his father. He is even able to absorb the
hurtful fact that his society "friends" drop him like a hot potato. He only wanted to be
nice to them; he had no other angle. He enjoyed being on the inside, looking on,
overhearing, knowing the real dish. Now he faces murder charges, just because he
was a good guy.

"The Walker" is the third of Schrader's "man in a room" films, after "American
Gigolo" (1980) and "Light Sleeper" (1992), which starred Dafoe as an upscale drug
dealer who tries to get one of his clients off drugs. All three movies involve
employment by wealthy older women. Schrader extended the "man in a room" theme
to his longtime collaborator Martin Scorsese in his screenplays for "Taxi Driver" and
"Raging Bull." There is always the same signature: the man in his private space,
preparing himself to go out in public. Both Richard Gere of "Gigolo" and Woody
Harrelson of "The Walker" play men who take elaborate pains with their appearance,
when it is their reality they should be concerned about.

I have heard complaints that the film "drags in" the murder plot. This is nonsense.
All three films involve their heroes in a crime they did not commit, and all three show
them trapped as a consequence of their occupations. There is a deep morality at work
here, as often in Schrader's work. Also, of course, without the crime as a plot engine,
the movie might be only a character study ending on a bittersweet minor chord. I
found it fascinating to see Carter Page III discovering under fire that he is, after all, a
more loyal friend than his famous father, and a better man.