Rutger Hauer Documentary “LIKE TEARS IN THE RAIN” (2025) Finds the "Dutch Angle” (REVIEW)
The lives of character actors usually make terrific fodder for documentaries. We’ve seen these people of 1,000 faces throughout our moviegoing lives, and while we might not always know their names, something registers in our brains enough to go “hey, it’s him/her/them from that thing!” One of the most memorable of these performers in the past several decades is the late, great Rutger Hauer, who passed away in 2019. Now, Hauer’s life and legacy is explored in director Sanna Fabery de Jonge’s doc “Like Tears in Rain,” a eulogy to a man that more people should consider one of the greats of genre film.
Fabery de Jonge’s angle is personal, as she was also Hauer’s goddaughter. Unbeknownst to the public, he took hours upon hours of home videos throughout his life. After the footage was destroyed in a flood, Fabery de Jonge discovered more recordings. As a result, her film contains a level of intimacy we don’t often see in examinations like this. Cinephiles hoping to get a deep dive into his filmography will have to wait a little while as we learn more about the man himself.
Like most biographical docs, Fabery de Jonge goes mostly in chronological order to cover Hauer’s life. Along with her voiceover, we’re treated to interviews with family, friends, collaborators, and co-stars. The list ranges from fellow actors like Vincent D’Onofrio and Mickey Rourke, to directors like Robert Rodriguez and Paul Verhoeven, and most surprising of all, Whoopi Goldberg. The way Goldberg describes it, they were the platonic ideal of friendship. It made me wistful for the Goldberg/Hauer buddy comedy we never got. Verhoeven laments his role in typecasting Hauer as a villain in 1985’s “Flesh + Blood,” but by then Hauer was already well on his way to being known as one of the heaviest of heavies in films like “Nighthawks” and of course, “Blade Runner.”
Curiously, the doc omits “Blade Runner” until the ending, where it circles back to Hauer’s most famous role and the monologue that put him on the map. It’s a strange choice, not just due to the linear structure of the doc, but because “Blade Runner” was his follow up to “Nighthawks,” his American film debut. Fabery de Jonge recounts the heartbreaking story of Hauer losing his best friend and brother-in-law to cancer, while shooting the Sylvester Stallone vehicle in a strange new country. Wouldn’t this inform his subsequent performance as an android fighting his own extinction? Luckily, “Blade Runner” dovetails into a eulogy of sorts at the end, but I believe the subject could have been explored further.
As much as I love a taut 80-minute runtime, Fabery de Jonge easily could have made her doc longer. For example, Rodriguez worked with Hauer briefly on “Sin City,” for which he had one scene. The two of them became good friends until the end Hauer’s life. Maybe it’s the way Rodriguez recounts it, but it sounds like another welcoming avenue to explore. “Like Tears in Rain” doesn’t even touch on Hauer’s horror output. The number of vampire roles he played alone has to be some kind of record, from Kurt Barlow in “Salem’s Lot” to Dracula, himself in Dario Argento’s “Dracula 3D.” He was good at it, even if the film’s weren’t, but that examination is not one that Fabery de Jonge has in mind.
It’s hard to take exception with a film that loves its subject this much, especially when you want to see even more of why he was loved on an international scale. Her film is about a man who protested the closing of a hospital's oncology ward. A man who held a masterclass in the Netherlands to teach the next generation about filmmaking. A man who did incredibly philanthropic acts, who also happened to be an actor, admirably reversing the formula of these kinds of films. I just wish we got to see more of the artistry of the actor Verhoeven calls “the most important actor in the Netherlands.”
“Like Tears in Rain” is exclusively on Viaplay, available in the UK as an Amazon Prime Video Channels add on.
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