
Henry Miller Asleep & Awake
Henry Miller spends his final years in a house in Pacific Palisades where the bathroom walls, floor, even the toilet tank, are covered in his own watercolors, taped-up photographs, scrawled aphorisms, and pictures torn from magazines. Director Tom Schiller sets his camera in that one room and lets Miller wander through it half-dressed, running a bath, reminiscing in voiceover about sex, old age, death, and the women he loved, while the camera studies the collage he built around himself over decades. There is nudity, both Miller's own and the images papering his walls, which is why the film carries its warning, but the frankness matches the writer it is about. Schiller, later a Saturday Night Live short-film director, treats the bathroom as a self-portrait: a private museum a famous provocateur built for no audience but himself. At thirty-five minutes it never leaves the room, and it does not need to. Miller talks the way he wrote, unguarded and specific, and the clutter around him tells its own version of the same story.