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Gracie Marcellus
September 2018
Life Lessons - Lionel Dobie’s Character


Lionel Dobie, played by Nick Nolte, is an unlikable guy who the audience has empathy for. He’s also an artist that has been struggling to paint until Paulette, played by Rosanna Arquette, his muse/assistant comes back into his life. Throughout the film, the filmmakers use cinematic technique to help create a complex character of a brilliant artist with some serious flaws.


Dobie is described as being “confronted with the terror and awfulness of mortality. That’s the price he has to pay for being a famous painter.” Dobie was truly the most frustrating character to watch on the screen. An example of this can be seen when Dobie is staring at Paulette’s foot in her bedroom. After the iris shot of her foot, there’s a cut into a a blue light sequence showing us how Dobie is feeling. When we cut back, the filmmakers instantly show us his eyes. He’s obviously still longing for her and it takes him a few more seconds to try to shake the feeling from his mind. His obsession with her was clearly shown within that sequence. In the end, he still pays a price for being a painter because we know that “When Rosanna Arquette leaves Nick Nolte, he is looking into the abyss of the only thing that changes about him - his age.”


His choice of music set the mood each time he continued painting. The music (rock song by Bob Dylan “Like a Rolling Stone”) was definitely needed when Paulette walks down the stairs to yell at him and instead, ends up feeling mesmerized by his painting. The music during that scene felt like it got louder and louder until you were just completely lost in his painting. The specific splatters and art he created, was zoomed in on a lot during that scene as well, making the choices in that scene even smoother. The choice of music for each individual moment in his life was definitely carefully selected by the filmmakers in order to to show us how his character developed throughout the film.


His life was hanging by a thread and yet the audience felt so attached to him. There’s an example of this when Dobie stops painting for a moment and looks up into Paulette’s bedroom. Knowing that Paulette is with another man, Dobie furiously paints his canvas. There’s a lot of quick cuts and zooms during this scene. Afterwards, we see that the paint has splattered all over Dobie’s glasses and chest. There’s a moment when it feels like the camera movement comes to a complete stop. The moment is when he gets up out of his chair and slowly walks towards Paulette’s window. As he’s longing for her, they cut to a wide shot to show him still looking up into her window. The filmmakers made sure that his raw emotion was visually shown during that scene.
In conclusion, Dobie is a very complex and thought out character. The filmmakers did a very good job about communicating to us that he wasn’t a perfect character and that he had some serious flaws. Like a dog to a bone, Dobie was attached to his art. His art was definitely a great way to showcase his character’s emotional journey. Even though we don’t end up knowing what happens with his new muse/assistant, we can still come to the conclusion that Lionel Dobie probably will never stop creating art because as they pointed out, “When Rosanna Arquette leaves Nick Nolte, he is looking into the abyss of the only thing that changes about him - his age.”

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