PEACEFUL WARRIOR (Victor Salva, 2006)

Francis Ford Coppola “discovered” director Victor Salva and bankrolled the launch of his career. He is a terrible filmmaker, very much in a manipulative mold. (He made the 1995 cult film Powder.) He also has an unsavory past, about which you can read elsewhere.
     Salva’s Peaceful Warrior is a sports film, so it’s quite focused on making us cry at the drop—as it happens here—of a college gymnast, beautifully played by Scott Mechlowitz. Nick Nolte plays a quasi-Buddhist service station owner who mentors the boy by dispensing fortune cookie aphorisms that are allegedly wise and capable of pointing the way to Enlightenment. The film, based on an “autobiographical novel” by self-help guru Dan Millman, is, we are told at the outset, “inspired by real events.” This is a dreadful, silly film.
     Millman supported the project every step of the way—and this is a bad thing, of course, since it was the filmmaker’s job to criticize the man’s book, not (figuratively) be in bed with the author. But schlock filmmakers never do their job; instead, they want to “bring the book to the screen.”