by Miguel E. Rodriguez
DIRECTOR: Billy Wilder
CAST: Ray Milland, Jane Wyman, Phillip Terry, Howard Da Silva
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 97% Certified Fresh
PLOT: The desperate life of a chronic alcoholic is followed through a four-day drinking bout.
I don’t drink. Like, at all. I’ve never taken drugs, and I’ve never smoked a cigarette. Luckily, I have never been gripped in the throes of a crippling addiction, unless collecting movies counts as an addiction, in which case I plead the fifth. I say this, not to brag, but because a lot of my first impressions of Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend are tinted by the fact that I don’t know the first thing about being drunk or what it means to suffer from an addiction so crippling that it would force me to hang a liquor bottle outside my window to hide it from my brother.
As it happens, Don Birnam (Ray Milland) DOES suffer from this kind of mid-to-late-stage alcoholism. We first meet Don as he and his brother, Wick (Phillip Terry), are packing for a long weekend to get away from everything and everyone, including alcohol. Don is a would-be author who needs a break from…something. (Whatever he went through is never specified, only hinted at: “It’ll be good for you, Don, after what you’ve been through.”) Don’s plan to surreptitiously pack the hidden bottle of liquor falls through after the arrival of his almost unbelievably good-hearted girlfriend, Helen (Jane Wyman). No matter. He still has a plan, which he confides to the long-suffering but increasingly annoyed bartender, Nat (Howard Da Silva). He’s bought two bottles of rye. He’ll hide one badly in his own suitcase and another in his brother’s suitcase. When Wick discovers the badly hidden bottle in Don’s suitcase, he’ll chew Don out, Don will act suitably contrite, and Wick won’t think about searching his OWN suitcase for a second bottle. What could go wrong?
During these first few scenes, when Don lies and lies and drinks shot after shot in a bar and winds up missing the train for his getaway weekend, I found it difficult to sympathize with him. Oh, he’s clever and loquacious when he’s either about to drink or while he’s drinking. He has enough knowledge to quote Shakespeare at the right times and wittily proposes to Nat the bartender: “I wish I could take you along, Nat. You and all that goes with you.” Under the right circumstances, Don is a fun guy, always good for a laugh…until his seventh or eight or ninth shot of bourbon. Then the other Don shows up, Don the drunk, Don the liar, the Don who gets so desperate for cash that he’ll walk 70 or 80 New York City blocks trying to find an open pawn shop so he can hock his typewriter for drinking money.
For some reason, it was harder for me to empathize with Don Birnam than it was to empathize with any of the main characters in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream (2000). In that film, not a single leading character escapes the ravages of addiction, and yet even as they made their mistakes, I empathized with them and grieved when their bad decisions made things worse and worse. With Don Birnam, however, every bad decision he made just made me like him less and less. I remember thinking at one point, “He’s brought this all on himself, he deserves what he gets.” Not a very Christian attitude, but I’m not gonna lie about it: that’s what I felt.
And his girlfriend, Helen…wow. It’s almost like she needs as much of an intervention as he does. She loves Don so unconditionally it’s almost unbelievable. What’s the attraction? Perhaps it’s symptomatic of the era in which The Lost Weekend was made. She discovers Don’s alcoholism late in their 3-year dating relationship. (What did people think in 1945 of someone who dates a man for 3 years?) Instead of breaking up with him or giving him ultimatums, she devotes herself to “fixing” Don. Not precisely the course of action I would recommend myself in today’s world, but there you have it.
Director Billy Wilder presents this first half of the movie in a very uninflected tone with little-to-no comic relief. This flat tone becomes very effective at simply presenting the information without directly commenting on it one way or the other. There are moments up to this point where the movie seems to side with Don (his struggle to find a bottle whose hiding place he’s forgotten is particularly pathetic), but it’s still not really passing judgment or giving him a pass.
And then…the turning point. Don accidentally falls down a flight of stairs and knocks himself out after finagling some drinking money out of a young lady he flirts with at his favorite dive. When he wakes up, he’s lying in a bed in the Alcoholic Ward of the local hospital, face to face with one of the strangest characters I’ve ever met in a Billy Wilder movie, and that’s saying something. He’s a nurse. “Name of Nolan. They call me Bim. You…can call me Bim.” The closest I can get to describing Bim’s weirdness is to imagine an evil Waylon Smithers from The Simpsons as a male nurse. On quaaludes. To Don’s slowly increasing discomfort, Bim lovingly describes what Don is in for during his stay on the Alcoholic Ward, giving the inside scoop on the various repeat offenders and what to expect during his D.T.’s: “You know that stuff about pink elephants? That’s the bunk. It’s little animals. Little tiny turkeys in straw hats. Midget monkeys coming through the keyholes.” This Bim…he has NO bedside manner, man. “Prohibition…that’s what started most of these guys off. Whoopee!” (Nice little social commentary there…classic Wilder.)
Don manages to find his way home once again, having not had a drink for almost a day-and-a-half, if my memory is correct. And it’s at this point that the movie, Billy Wilder, and Ray Milland finally got me in Don Birnam’s corner.
SPOILER ALERT, SPOILERS COMING.
Don finally has a bout of the D.T.’s. It’s not turkeys or monkeys or elephants, though…it’s a rat. A single rat chewing its way out of the wall in front of him. Then, out of nowhere…a bat finds its way into the apartment and flutters around the room. Don is understandably distressed. But then the capper: the bat swoops down to where the mouse’s head is poking through the hole, there is a terrible squealing sound, the bat sort of trembles and scuffles…and a stream of thick blood starts to dribble out of the hole where the bat is presumably chewing the rat’s head off or something.
To say I was surprised is an understatement. Don starts screaming his head off…and at long last I finally empathized with Don’s situation, and I no longer wanted him to wind up penniless and/or alone and/or dead. I wanted the movie to find a way to fix him, like Helen tries desperately to do through the entire picture. From then on, I was on his side, or Helen’s side, or whoever’s side, it didn’t matter, as long as he figured out a way to get out from under the disease that was slowly killing him.
I would not dream of revealing exactly how the movie ends. It might go the way of Leaving Las Vegas (1996). Or it might go the way of the vastly underseen Duane Hopwood (2005), featuring David Schwimmer as an alcoholic father on a path of self-destruction, but who manages to turn things around. (Sorry if I spoiled that for you, but I’m betting it’s not a movie most people will want to seek out.) I will say that it’s the ending of The Lost Weekend that really showcases the era in which it was made more than anything else. But it could just as easily have gone the other way and still been just as successful.
The Lost Weekend cleaned up at the 1945 Oscars, winning awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay (it was based on a novel). At the time, it was the most unglamorous movie ever made about alcoholism. Up to that point, drinking in movies rarely if ever led to hangovers and the D.T.’s and spending the night in the Alcoholic Ward. It certainly belongs to be mentioned with Wilder’s greatest films. But you’re gonna wanna watch something a little lighter afterwards. Stalag 17, maybe. Or Some Like It Hot. A laughter chaser.
2 UNPAID MOVIE CRITICS!!!! 