The Walker (15) ****

Page's coterie comprises three "women of a certain age", Lynn (Kristin Scott Thomas), the wife of liberal senator Larry Lockner (Willem Dafoe), Abigail (Lily Tomlin), wife of Republican hawk Jack Delorean (Ned Beatty), and Washington widow and grand dame Natalie Van Miter (Lauren Bacall), with all of whom Carter enjoys a weekly game of canasta, as well as regular ladies' lunches, champagne receptions, nights at the opera, and so on.

It's a very superficial life, but it perfectly suits the 50-year-old Page. He has convinced himself he's a shamelessly shallow, unapologetically ambition-free fellow and has styled himself as a southern-states gentleman despite, or perhaps because of his antagonistic relationship with his late father - who was a well-respected US senator and governor of his home state of Virginia.

Cracks begin to appear in the veneer of Page's carefully maintained social life, however, when Lynn Lockner discovers the bloody dead body of another society walker with whom she was acquainted. This walker also turns out to have had business dealings with Lynn's husband, and so his murder poses the threat of a potentially career-destroying scandal for senator Lockner - who has numerous Republican enemies on the hill.

Unwisely, with hindsight, Page offers to cover for Lynn's discovery of the body, and thereafter he finds himself being harassed by an ambitious conservative District Attorney and shunned by his coterie of women friends. Only his lover, a young Middle Eastern artist named Emek (Mortiz Bleibtreu), offers the increasingly bewildered walker assistance, but the passionate youth's enthusiasm to play detective and solve the crime serves only to further compromise Page's position.

With its similarities of character, plot and theme, The Walker works as a companion piece to Schrader's 1980 film, American Gigolo. In that earlier film - the one that put Schrader, the screenwriter of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, on the map as a directing talent - Richard Gere plays a narcissistic male prostitute working in Los Angeles who becomes entangled in the death of the politician husband of one of his clients and subsequently finds himself being framed for murder.

Like Gere's Julian, Carter Page studiously avoids involvement in life at anything more than surface level, but the protagonists of both films are ripped out of their reverie by a set of extreme circumstances seemingly beyond their control. It's in this sense that Schrader's films are most similar, and it's in this way that they're most involving, given their initially not particularly sympathetic protagonists.

Schrader himself has gone further in drawing comparisons between the films. He has pointed out that The Walker is, in his view, part of a loose-knit quartet about "the male psyche as it grows through life", the other films being Taxi Driver, in which Robert De Niro's twentysomething Vietnam veteran was a very angry young man; American Gigolo, with Gere's self-regarding thirtysomething prostitute; and Light Sleeper, in which Willem Dafoe's fortysomething drug dealer was an exceedingly anxious insomniac.

Schrader's four-decades-long take on the mind of man presents a fairly dim view of the male of the species, and also of the environments within which they operate. It nevertheless makes for an interesting and, in the end, quite sympathetic series of character studies. Appropriately then, The Walker focuses more on how Carter Page deals with being involved in a murder investigation than it does with the actual crime and investigation itself.

The problem that besets Page is not so much whether he's going to be nailed by the DA for a crime he didn't commit, nor whether he's going to be the next walker in line to be stabbed to death, but whether or not he'll overcome his reluctance to come out of his shell - he's already well out of the closet, anyway - and really participate in life.

A character study like The Walker needs a good performance, and Harrelson contributes a great one. As mannered as his Carter Page is, with his old-fashioned gentlemanly ways and camp charm, Harrelson also gives the impression he is in no way merely skin deep. There's a world-weariness in Page that's ultimately very affecting, but there's also a nobility that - combined with Page's underlying sadness - generates no little amount of pathos. And while Page's homosexuality is integral to the plot of the film - in the sense that it makes him a safe escort, but also brands him as an outsider in Washington - it nevertheless feels incidental to the character, and that's a genuine coup for Harrelson and Schrader.

With such a well-defined central figure, the film's criticism of US politics, both Washington DC in general and the Bush junta in particular, doesn't feel laboured as it might easily have done. Instead, Schrader's condemnation of those people walking the corridors of power provides this very humane film with a fine critical, political backdrop.