Helmsley Arts Centre

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The Walker (15)

• Consumer Advice: Contains strong language and moderate violence
• Run time: 1 hour 48 mins

• Genre: Drama
• Release date: 10th August 2007

• Starring: Woody Harrelson, Kristin Scott Thomas, Lauren Bacall
• Directed by: Paul Schrader

• Official Website: www.thewalkermovie.co.uk
• Distributor: Pathe Distribution

Plot Synopsis

THE WALKER is the story of CARTER PAGE III, a society “walker” in Washington DC, a “job” which entails squiring the wives of the rich and powerful to the opera and such because their husbands couldn’t be bothered.

He has three primary friends, all ‘women of a certain age’, LYNN, ABBY and NATALIE as well as a younger boyfriend, EMEK. Carter and his women friends play canasta each Wednesday.

Lynn, the wife of a liberal senator, contacts Carter when she finds her lover murdered. To save her and her husband political embarrassment, Carter agrees to say that he, not Lynn, discovered the body.

Complications ensue when MUNGO TENANT, an ambitious, conservative US District Attorney, determines to implicate both Carter and Lynn in her lover’s death. Carter is soon caught in a web of Washington intrigue and mixed motives. The son of a US senator and Virginia governor, Carter has prided himself in being “superficial” and “the black sheep.” As his friends desert him, as the net grows tighter, he must decide exactly how superficial he is: does he turn on the friends who have deserted him to save his own skin? Does he become involved?

Carter and Emek (a newspaper photographer) using their own connections, set out to discover who is behind the plot to smear Lynn (therefore her husband) and how this ties in to the murder of her lover. Carter and Emek solve the murder and extricate Lynn from her political bind—but at the cost of Carter’s reputation. He must leave Washington, start a new life in New York.