A barroom love story without glamour
In Barfly, released in 1987 and directed by Barbet Schroeder, Faye Dunaway plays Wanda Wilcox, a hard-drinking woman who lives in a cheap Los Angeles apartment and spends her days in dive bars, trading jokes, insults, and drinks with the regulars. She meets Henry Chinaski, played by Mickey Rourke, the alter ego of writer Charles Bukowski, who wrote the screenplay from his own experiences. Henry is a poet who writes for small magazines, fights with bartenders, and drinks as if it were a job. Wanda is his match: funny, battered, tender, and just as committed to the bottle as he is. Dunaway plays her without a trace of her earlier glamour. Her hair is messy, her clothes are worn, her makeup is smeared, and her performance is one of the most unvanquished, human things she ever did on screen.
The film is set in a world of bars with names like the Golden Horn, of cheap rooms, of men who talk too much and women who have heard it all before. Schroeder films that world with a documentary eye, using real locations and a cast of weathered faces, and Dunaway fits into it completely. She does not play Wanda as a fallen star or as a woman waiting to be rescued. She plays her as a person who has chosen, or drifted into, a life on the margins, and who finds in that life a kind of freedom and a kind of humour. When Wanda says, in answer to a question about what she does, that she drinks, Dunaway delivers the line without self-pity. It is a fact, not a confession, and that matter-of-factness is what makes Wanda so affecting.
Bukowski, Rourke, and a partnership of equals
Charles Bukowski wrote Barfly as a semi-autobiographical portrait of his years drinking in Los Angeles, and he based Wanda on Jane Cooley Baker, a woman he loved who died young. That history gives the film a melancholy undertone, but Schroeder and his actors do not play it as a tragedy. They play it as a comedy of survival, in which two damaged people find each other and, for a time, make each other’s lives bearable. Rourke’s Henry is a shambling, funny, self-destructive poet, and Dunaway’s Wanda is his equal in wit and in drinking. Their scenes together, in bars, in Wanda’s apartment, in arguments that turn into laughter, are the heart of the film. Dunaway and Rourke have a wonderful, battered chemistry: they insult each other, they fight, they make up, and they understand each other in ways that more respectable characters in the film do not.
One of the film’s central tensions arrives with Tully Sorenson, played by Alice Krige, a wealthy literary agent who wants to publish Henry’s work and who offers him a different life: a clean apartment, money, and respectability. Henry is tempted, and Wanda is jealous and afraid, not only of losing Henry, but of losing the only person who accepts her as she is. Dunaway plays that jealousy without turning Wanda into a villain. She shows a woman who knows she cannot compete with Tully’s world, and who also knows that Henry does not belong in that world either. When Henry returns to the bar, to Wanda, and to drinking, Dunaway does not play it as a triumph. She plays it as a choice, sad and funny at once, between two kinds of life, neither of which is entirely good for either of them.
A performance against type
Barfly was a deliberate change of direction for Dunaway after the excess of Mommie Dearest. Critics who had associated her with glamour and control were surprised by Wanda’s messiness, humour, and vulnerability. Dunaway was nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a drama for the role, and the nomination recognised something important: she was willing to strip away her star image and play a woman who is not beautiful in the conventional sense, who is not successful, and who is not in control. That willingness is rare among stars of her generation, and it gives Barfly its power. Wanda is not a star turn. She is a character, fully inhabited, and Dunaway’s lack of vanity in the role is its own kind of glamour.
Schroeder’s direction supports that approach. He lets scenes run long, he lets actors talk over each other, and he fills the frame with the textures of bar life: glasses, ashtrays, neon signs, and worn wood. Dunaway moves through that world as if she had always lived there. She laughs loudly, she swears, she dances, and she collapses, and she makes each of those actions feel like part of a single, coherent person. Her Wanda is not a collection of tics. She is a woman with a past, a sense of humour, and a capacity for love that survives drinking, fighting, and disappointment.
Alcohol, art, and the price of freedom
Barfly is not a film about alcoholism in the conventional, moralising sense. It does not preach, and it does not offer a cure. It shows drinking as a way of life, with its pleasures and its costs, and it shows art as something that happens in spite of, and because of, that life. Henry writes poems between drinks, and Wanda listens to them, argues with them, and sometimes inspires them. Dunaway understands that Wanda is not just Henry’s girlfriend. She is his audience, his critic, and his fellow traveller. When she tells Henry that his writing matters, she means it, and when she tells him he is a fool, she also means it. That double honesty is what makes their relationship feel real.
The film’s ending, in which Henry returns to the bar after rejecting Tully’s world, has been read as both romantic and bleak. Dunaway’s final scenes capture that ambiguity. Wanda welcomes Henry back, but she does not pretend that their life together will be easy or safe. She knows they will drink, fight, and hurt each other again, and she chooses that life anyway, because it is the life in which she is herself. Dunaway plays that choice with a sad, knowing smile, and the film ends not with a moral, but with a portrait of two people who have found, in each other, a kind of home.
Why Wanda Wilcox endures
Wanda endures because she is one of Dunaway’s most human creations, and one of her least guarded. After years of playing controlled, glamorous, and dangerous women, Dunaway played a woman who is messy, funny, and open about her failures, and she did it with a generosity that surprised audiences. Wanda is not a heroine in the traditional sense, but she is a person, and Dunaway’s performance insists on her dignity. She drinks, she fights, she loves, and she survives, and that survival, without glamour or apology, is its own achievement.
Watch Barfly for Bukowski’s dialogue and Rourke’s shambling charm, but watch Dunaway for the surprise at its centre. Notice how she laughs, how she listens to Henry’s poems, and how she makes a dive bar feel like a place where real life happens. Wanda Wilcox is proof that Faye Dunaway’s range extended far beyond the cool, elegant heroines for which she was famous, and that her greatest strength as an actress was her willingness to be unglamorous, unguarded, and completely human.