[The films of Paul Schrader] are difficult to get hold of. They are not only about contradictions, they deal in them. As often as not they employ shock effects that appear to pander to what the moralists among us would call our baser instincts….

Once upon a time when we went to the movies, there was never any doubt about what we were supposed to think. We knew who were the good guys and who were the bad. Some of this had to do with typecasting but, basically, it was the result of the laws laid down by the old Production Code, which said that crime could not pay except, of course, for the producers who made films showing us the manifold ways in which crime could not pay again and again and again.

Moral outrage, though prefabricated, was built into our films. The Production Code made things simpler then. But so, too, did the times….

The extent to which things have changed today is reflected in the sort of films Mr. Schrader is making, particularly in "Hardcore," which will, I'm sure, upset a lot of people, principally because it gives every indication of exploiting the permissiveness about which it seems to have very mixed feelings. Even the title can be seen as a cheap come-on. Yet the movie isn't to be dismissed. It's a serious film, seriously conceived and executed….

"Hardcore" is not much more than straightforward melodrama that takes its audience on a sightseeing tour of the porn world that a lot of people haven't before had the interest (or perhaps courage) to see for themselves. Sleaze is the style, and there are those for whom sleaze is essential to the art of pornography. Among the characters that Jake [the protagonist] meets are porn movie producers, actors, actresses, hookers, hustlers, drifters and, most important, a pretty, pathetic, half-baked would-be porn star named Niki….

"Hardcore" has a lot of faults, not the least of which (some will say) is the entertaining way it allows us to look inside this particular underworld without fear of contamination or discovery. A more serious problem is the manner in which the movie asks us to take a lot of its psychological underpinnings on faith….

Mr. Schrader asks us to make a lot of assumptions but I'm inclined to make them, understanding that what he set out to do was to make a conventional melodrama in a milieu that itself is the reason for the picture. I don't mean only the Southern California porn world, but the good, solid, prosperous, Protestant, middle-American world that has produced Jake and his family.

As in his "Blue Collar," Mr. Schrader here demonstrates an extraordinary sensitivity to the realities of the American heritage that are seldom even thought about on screen, much less dramatized. His characters are complex. Unfortunately the melodrama seldom matches their complexity. It is blunt, clumsy—melodrama that seems not to reflect life but the way lives are led in movies.

At its best, "Hardcore" is an inventory of opposing forces in contemporary American life as revealed in the course of Jake's search. The movie is constructed of opposites, even visually. There is tension before the credits are over in the contrast between the film's lurid title and the background shots we see of children playing in the snow. We know that the security of the happy family we see sitting down to Christmas dinner is going to be shattered, but not quite how. Climate is emblematic. Snow and cold are the old way of life that one knew how to cope with. Southern California's sun and warmth suggest a world where faith is no longer required: you don't have to work to keep warm. No wonder people fall apart in California. Life is too easy. If one grew up in the fierce winters of the upper Middle West (as Mr. Schrader did), Southern California is the devil's paradise.

"Hardcore" raises more questions than it has any interest in answering, and Mr. Schrader is ambivalent in his feelings toward the society that created Jake, [his teenage daughter] Kristen and (another assumption on my part) the filmmaker himself. He has sympathy for these people who, in spite of their right-mindedness, cannot deal with the world as it really is. He also has affection for the lost and the muddled, like Niki, who at one point says to Jake, "We are alike, you know." Jake: "We are not!" Niki: "You think so little of sex you never do it. I think so little of it I don't care who I do it with."

Everyone, finally, is in the same boat.

"Hardcore" expresses no easily identifiable moral outrage. It means to be an entertaining chase film that gets all the mileage it can from its exotic backgrounds. This is the way things are, it says. This is where America is. The old values no longer hold, and there are no new ones for people like Kristen and Niki, who wanly describes herself as "a Venusian." I suspect that some part of Mr. Schrader agrees with Jake when he launches into a tirade about the part that television, movies and advertising are playing in the changing of the scene, but Mr. Schrader also knows such tirades are futile. The world that Jake would deny continues to exist. What can one do? Mr. Schrader has made a movie about it that can be seen either as a cynical rip-off or as a position paper prepared by someone who is concerned but not dropping out. Take your pick.