Hitting the booze: Why does Hollywood so often soft pedal on its drunks?
Cinema’s depictions of alcoholism are rarely frank or true to life, writes Geoffrey Macnab. But there are a few exceptions
Hollywood can’t decide whether to censure or celebrate its drunken heroes. It frequently gives awards to those playing alcoholics – but the ways in which they are portrayed are wildly varied. Only occasionally do films show honestly the squalor and destructiveness of the typical alcoholic’s life. It is far more commonplace for their condition to be used as a source of pathos, or of comedy, than to see them soiling themselves or throwing up.
In the silent era, drinking and slapstick often went hand in hand. Charlie Chaplin has many sublime drunken moments in his films: zig-zagging his way home in an inebriated state, putting his foot in the goldfish bowl as he climbs through the window, falling down staircases, slipping up on rugs, dizzy with drink and forlornly trying to hold his balance as the entire world revolves against him.
In comedies, drunkards often behave like holy innocents. Think, for example, of WC Fields as Egbert Souse in The Bank Dick (1940). Wherever Fields goes, mayhem follows but the alcohol shields him from the chaos around him. He blunders through the film in a good natured daze, inadvertently catching thieves, solving crimes and even briefly (in the film’s most surrealistic section) taking charge of a movie when its original director is carted off even more drunk than he is.
In ostensibly harrowing films about the effects of serious drinking, stars somehow maintain their poise and glamour. Whether Meg Ryan in When a Man Loves a Woman (1994) or Greta Garbo in one of her earliest talkies Anna Christie (1930) (“Give me a visky, ginger ale on the side and don’t be stingy baby!”) – even, more recently, Emily Blunt in The Girl on the Train (2016) – characters you might expect to have almighty hangovers still look as luminous as ever in their close-ups.
Nonetheless, over the last century, many exceptional and very perceptive films have been made on the subject of drink. This year marks the 25th anniversary of Mike Figgis’ Leaving Las Vegas (1995) and the 75th of Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend (1945), two of the most celebrated movies about alcoholism. Their respective stars, Nicolas Cage and Ray Milland, both won Oscars playing men deep in their cups.
Perhaps surprisingly, The Lost Weekend is the harsher, more honest movie, while Leaving Las Vegas has a very tender core.
Mike Figgis, who based his screenplay on John O’Brien’s semi-autobiographical novel, tells a bleak story. Alcoholic screenwriter Ben Sanderson (Cage) loses his job in LA and heads to Vegas to drink himself to death. He has allowed himself four weeks to complete the task and has set aside several hundred dollars a day to keep himself in booze.
“You shouldn’t drink so much,” Ben is warned early in the film. “Maybe I shouldn’t breathe so much,” he replies, as if the two activities are interchangeable. He is at the end of his tether. He has lost his family and burnt his passport and almost all his possessions. He just wants to die. In Vegas, he almost runs over a sex worker, Sera (Elisabeth Shue). Inevitably, they are drawn together. Like him, she is desperate and full of self-loathing. She has an abusive, macho pimp (Julian Sands putting on an eastern European accent).
In best method style, Cage reportedly did huge amounts of heavy drinking to get himself in trim for the role, paying particular attention to his slurred speech patterns when he was under the influence. Nonetheless, this is one of the actor’s sweetest natured and most ingratiating performances. He is far more restrained here than when he is playing supposedly more sober characters. Even when Ben is hitting on women in bars or embarrassing old friends in restaurants, he never seems that obnoxious. At the very start of the movie when he is shown wheeling his trolley through a supermarket, filling it high with every kind of spirit imaginable, he has the gleeful look of a kid in a sweetshop. Declan Quinn’s cinematography of neon-lit, night-time Vegas, and the beguiling music (everything from Sting to elegiac jazz), give the film an incongruously beguiling feel. In their softly lit scenes together, Cage’s suicidal alcoholic and Shue’s emotionally bruised sex worker sometimes still behave as if they’ve stumbled out of a romcom.
The Lost Weekend is grittier and more detailed in its depiction of the alcoholic’s life. Unlike Cage’s character, who can afford to spend a small fortune on his whisky and gin, Don Birnam (Milland) is badly strapped for cash during the three-day binge which makes up most of the movie. He’s a furtive, desperate character living in the cramped New York apartment he shares with his brother. The film is full of excruciating scenes in which he humiliates himself in pursuit of just one more shot of rye… and then, of course, just one more shot after that. He secretes bottles in nooks all over the apartment. Early on, we see him rummaging in a vacuum cleaner bag where he thinks he has left whisky. He will hide it on bookshelves, above lamps, in bathroom cabinets, or will leave it dangling by a string outside the window so his brother doesn’t confiscate it. If he runs out of money, he’ll steal it from the cleaner, or take a stranger’s handbag, or borrow it from his long suffering girlfriend (Jane Wyman), or pawn his typewriter.
Like so many of Hollywood’s alcoholics, Don is a failed writer. In moments of self-reflection, he will justify his own behaviour. He drinks out of frustration at his professional disappointments. “It shrinks my liver, doesn’t it? It pickles my kidneys, yes. But what does it do to my mind? It tosses the sandbags overboard so the balloon can soar,” he explains of the transforming effect of intoxication. For a moment, after that first sip, he feels like “one of the great ones”. However, once he is locked up with other patients suffering from delirium tremens and having alcoholic hallucinations, that feeling of exultation quickly dissipates.
As Gene Phillips’ biography of Wilder recalls, America’s alcohol industry lobbied hard to stop The Lost Weekend being distributed. They argued that the “professional prohibitionists” would use it as a weapon to get prohibition reintroduced. The mafia reportedly offered to buy the original negative and all the prints to take them out of circulation. In the event, The Lost Weekend turned into a huge critical and commercial success. Its downbeat message didn’t hit alcohol sales at all.
Preston Sturges’ Mad Wednesday (also known as The Sin of Harold Diddlebock) (1947) was made two years after The Lost Weekend. It wasn’t successful and is best remembered now for marking silent cinema legend Harold Lloyd’s final screen performance. However, it stands as one of Hollywood’s more subversive alcohol-themed films. Lloyd’s character, a repressed middle-aged office worker who has led a thoroughly mediocre life, loses his job. He has never drunk alcohol before but from the moment he sips his first cocktail, his personality is transformed for the better. The browbeaten nonentity turns into an alpha male, a wildly flamboyant gambler and man about town.
Drunkards in movies are sometimes far more benign than the mean-spirited people around them. That is certainly the case in Arthur (1981), in which Dudley Moore plays the spoilt but very charming millionaire who drinks martinis in his bubble-filled bath, and in Harvey (1950) in which James Stewart enjoys bar-room conversations with his giant, invisible rabbit.
Coming somewhere between Mad Wednesday and The Lost Weekend are all the films spun off from Charles Bukowski and Henry Miller novels about proudly drunken and defiant literary misfits and would-be intellectuals who relish living on Skid Row.
Barbet Schroeder’s Barfly (1987) was written by Bukowski and based on his own life. Mickey Rourke plays the Bukowski character, with Faye Dunaway incongruously cast as one of his fellow alcoholics. The pleasure here comes from the eccentric performances. You can’t help but enjoy seeing the stars slumming it in a high-budget Hollywood film about low-lifes. Rourke, still in his mid-thirties when he played Henry Chinaski, was still too young for his role. He looks far healthier and better preserved here than in The Wrestler (2008), which has nothing to do with Bukowski but which arguably came closer to the spirit of his work.
Dozens of Hollywood films in recent years have featured former alcoholics in recovery programmes, dealing with their condition as if it is a rite of passage. One of the best lines in Robert Altman’s Hollywood satire The Player (1992) comes when an ambitious young executive announces to the main character, Griffin (Tim Robbins), that he’s off to an AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) meeting. Griffin says in a concerned voice that he didn’t realise the executive had a drinking problem. “Well I don’t really, but that’s where all the deals are being made these days,” comes the reply, only partially tongue in cheek.
Hector Babenco’s Ironweed (1988) stars Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep as the street bums, ground down by grief and misfortune. They give typically complex and committed performances but alcoholics quickly become tiresome. If they’re not fighting against their predicament or caught up in comic mischief, it is an ordeal to watch them. Whether they’re ageing country singers, office executives who keep bottles in their desks, long in the tooth gunslingers, disappointed writers or dipsomaniacal diplomats, alcoholics can quickly exhaust our patience. That is why Hollywood so often soft pedals on its drunks.
Few films made within the studio system that are as brutally frank about alcoholism and domestic abuse as Gary Oldman’s Nil by Mouth (1997). In Oldman’s autobiographical drama, set on a south-London estate, Ray Winstone plays Ray, a violent alcoholic who terrorises his own family. He is nothing like the charming, cuddly sot played by Dudley Moore.
Hollywood’s depictions of alcoholism are rarely frank or true to life. However, actors continue to relish taking roles as drunks and lushes. Most make a very good job of it. From Paul Newman guzzling down the spirits in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), to Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick as the married couple for whom true love is getting dangerously sozzled together in Days of Wine and Roses (1962), and from Jason Robards in a booze filled rage in A Long Day’s Journey into Night (1962) to Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor tearing strips off each other in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), stars have scaled new heights where playing characters who just can’t stop drinking. That is why the studios won’t be climbing on the wagon anytime soon.
Leaving Las Vegas and The Lost Weekend are available to stream on Amazon
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