SMASHED Beautifully Navigates The Pitfalls Of Sobriety and Self-Improvement

"Love is the easy part, did you know that?  It's the rest of this shit that's hard."

I was fairly blown away by director James Ponsoldt's newest film, The Spectacular Now, particularly the smart and subtle ways the film dealt with the idea of alcoholism.  Sutter Keely has an indisputable problem with substance abuse, but it's never played as melodrama - his drinking causes him to make some unfortunate choices, but it isn't ruining his life just yet.  Ponsoldt's deft touch left me curious to check out his previous film Smashed, another drinker's tale whose trailer I could vaguely recall having watched once upon a time.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays Kate, a hard-partying elementary school teacher who's beginning to suspect that her drinking might be a serious problem.  More often than not these stories feature a main character whose biggest hurdle is simply admitting that they have a problem, but Ponsoldt eschews this familiar formula in favor of a protagonist who is extremely self aware.  Kate lies to her students and her principal, excusing an unfortunate instance of hangover vomiting as a symptom of pregnancy, and then soon finds herself chilling under a highway overpass and smoking crack with a stranger, all before the film's title card comes on screen.  These incidents set the stage for Kate's realization that it's time to quit drinking, although she has no idea just how difficult that course of action will ultimately prove.

Winstead gives a luminous performance in this fascinating character study, a story which revels in the daily grind of self-improvement as Kate attempts to get her shit together.  It ain't easy.  Smashed demonstrates that overcoming alcoholism is not as easy as simply deciding to stop drinking.  The real challenge lies in the follow through, and sometimes even if you make all the right choices, life can still throw you a curveball that brings everything crashing down around you.  Alcoholism is a disease after all, one whose only known vaccine is pure willpower and that's kind of insane when you think about it.  The only way to overcome a drinking problem is to decide to get better and then reinforce that decision every single day.  Forever.  It's fairly remarkable.  I drink just about every day because I love the taste of beer and whiskey and while I've certainly had some pretty wild nights, I've never considered my drinking to be a real problem.  I consider myself supremely lucky that I'm able to drink in moderation (yes I'm aware I just qualified daily alcohol consumption as "moderation") without it escalating to the point of negatively impacting my job or my relationships.  When I tell people about my decision to watch a movie every day, they're often impressed with that level of commitment, but that's nothing compared to someone who can convince themselves every hour, every minute to not take a drink even though all the cells in their body might be screaming out in desperation for a single sip of their preferred spirit.  Would I have that kind of willpower?  If I'm lucky, I'll never find out.

Kate's husband Charlie (Aaron Paul) supports her efforts in theory but makes no effort to curtail his own heavy alcohol consumption.  In fact, it soon becomes clear that he finds the whole idea of AA to be kind of bullshit and he resents that it seems to be pulling Kate away from him.  It's clear that a major component of their relationship is their mutual tendency to seriously cut loose, and if anything it seems clear that Kate could probably drink Charlie under the table.  But throughout their relationship, they've always operated on the same wavelength.  So when Kate suddenly changes gears, Charlie has trouble seeing it as anything other than alienating.  He doesn't view his own drinking as a problem and therefore likely considers Kate's newfound sobriety to be some kind of phase or experiment as opposed to legitimate self-improvement.  He just wants his fun-loving wife back.  Kate eventually relapses and hits the bottle HARD and it's in this moment of role reversal that Charlie truly sees just how scary and out of control Kate can truly be while under the influence.

As one half of a young married couple, it's impossible to watch the rift that forms in Kate and Charlie's relationship without considering my own.  If one of us decided to make a life-altering change in our lives then I'm sure the other would be extremely supportive, but at what point does that change start to tip the scales and become untenable?  Before we got married, Jamie and I had a conversation about the concept of divorce, which seemed like a fairly practical consideration.  If we were to get married and then years later found that we had simply evolved in different directions and were no longer happy together, would divorce be an option?  While our generation is certainly much more comfortable with the concept than those of the past, both of our parents remain together (respectively) and to be honest the whole idea of divorce doesn't quite sit well with me, like it's an admission of failure.  If you had just worked harder and made better choices, maybe you'd still be together.  At the same time, it seems absurd not to acknowledge that people and circumstances change over time, and while we might be happily married and want the same things at 30, the same simply might not be true at 40 or 50.  Commitment is admirable to be sure, but at that theoretical point what is there to be gained by digging into discontent and stubbornly refusing to admit the truth to each other and/or ourselves?  Obviously I hope that day never comes, but to dismiss it as an impossibility would be foolish.

Smashed clocks in at 81 minutes, and while the movie is punctuated by strong performances from Winstead, Paul, Nick Offerman and Octavia Spencer, that short running time does makes the story feel a bit slight.  But the film really serves as a snapshot, a glimpse into the nitty gritty and the rollercoaster of emotion that comes with deciding to walk a different path.  Making the decision can be hard, but what's harder still is sticking to that path and not veering off into the wilderness when things get tough.  The story doesn't really have a resolution per se, but that feels fitting since neither does sobriety.

You never really reach a destination, you simply keep moving forward one day at a time.  If you're lucky, you'll have someone by your side every step of the way.


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Title: Smashed
Director: James Ponsoldt
Starring: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Aaron Paul, Nick Offerman, Octavia Spencer, Meghan Mullally, Mary Kay Place, Kyle Gallner, Bree Turner
Year Of Release: 2012
Viewing Method: Netflix DVD

Someone Should Take A Flamethrower To THE THING Prequel/Remake

"So I'm gonna die because I floss?"

What a waste.

John Carpenter's The Thing is one of my absolute favorite movies of all time, although I admit that I was pretty late to that particular party.  It's simply wonderful in every single regard.  The Antarctic setting is at once expansive and claustrophobic and the story is twisted in such a way that keeps you guessing till the very last moment.  The cast is top notch: a great collection of familiar faces like David Clennon, Donald Moffat, Richard Masur and T.K. Carter, one of the all time great Kurt Russell performances, Keith David at his most badass, and WILFORD FUCKING BRIMLEY.  Plus, being a devout worshiper at the altar of 80s cinema, I have an undying love for great practical creature work, the gooier the better.  The Thing itself is simply astonishing, the true stuff of nightmares.  To be clear, I'm not a digital effects hater, but I've yet to see a digital werewolf transformation that's nearly so compelling as An American Werewolf In London and that shit's over 30 years old.

The idea of revisiting The Thing seemed to fall somewhere between unnecessary and foolhardy.  Prequels in general suffer from a critical flaw inherent to the very concept: we already know how the story has to end, so that automatically diminishes all the stakes.  That means that, unless you're going to leave us with something that alters our perception of what we thought we knew from the original, you've got to have either a story or a hero that is INCREDIBLY compelling to make it worth our while.  Otherwise there's simply no point.  You could do a straight remake, but with a film as iconic and borderline perfect as The Thing, why on Earth would you want to?  It's not like you're going to improve on what came before.

The Thing (2011) ends up trying to do a little bit of both, and all of it's just plain bad.  The fact that it has the same title only led to confusion among audiences as to exactly what kind of story they were trying to tell.  Watching the movie probably didn't help.  Ostensibly this new film is pitched as a prequel, detailing the story of the Norwegian outpost that first discovered the Thing frozen out there in the ice and there's certainly some potential in that concept.  We could learn more about the Thing itself and its ancient ship.  Perhaps the Norwegians had some nefarious intent, looking to control the creature like the Weyland-Yutani corporation from Aliens.  Hell, even if we got a character that's at least half as awesome as R.J. MacReady, at least that would guarantee some fun.

Unfortunately we get none of that.  Instead it's essentially the same story told again, except this time everyone's Norwegian.  All of the incredible creature work is replaced with some pretty half-baked digital effects (the final Thing at the end is particularly bad) which is pretty unforgivable.  Rick Bottin's grotesque original puppetry puts these digital farts to shame; whereas before I could spend all day staring at those monstrosities, their modern CG equivalents only made me cringe.  While the Thing is racking up the body count, the other big villain of the original film is paranoia.  Watching everyone second guess each other, trying to figure out who's human and who's not is half the fun.  Here there's almost no sense of dread, partially because the Thing itself makes almost no attempt to hide itself, transforming and attacking people right out in the open and often in the stupidest situation possible, like a helicopter in mid-air.  It doesn't help that most of the characters are forgettable non-entities, making me not really care who lives and who dies.  Mr. Eko from Lost plays Diet Keith David, while the great Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Joel Edgerton are both wasted as half of a watered down version of MacReady.

There are some poor attempts to further our knowledge of the creature, like the revelation that it can't replicate inorganic matter.  Sadly it's a pretty dull devlopment, leading to an almost comical recreation of the infamous blood test scene from the original where Mary Elizabeth Winstead's character shines a flashlight in everyone's mouth looking for fillings.  It's indicative of an unfortunate tendency of most prequels, where they feel the need to revisit every single detail of how things got to be they way you remember them.  For example, at one point Joel Edgerton goes after the Thing with an axe and it gets stuck in the wall.  When he tries to pull it out, Winstead tells him to leave it, and you can practically hear the script screaming, "YOU HAVE TO LEAVE IT SO THAT MACREADY CAN FIND IT LATER!"  Hell, the movie closes with an in-credits sequence (after a truly disappointing finale) detailing how the last two guys ended up chasing the dog to the American camp in the helicopter.  And yet, when the Thing first emerges from its icy sleep, instead of leaving a mostly intact ice-coffin like MacReady discovers, the ice block shatters into a thousand pieces, seemingly for no other reason than "it'll look cool."  Also, let's not forget that this is a movie set in the early 80s.  While the original featured all sorts of great once-futuristic-now-vintage tech like the chess playing computer that MacReady douses with scotch, there's almost no attempt by its lame successor to show off its period setting.  That could have been a lot of fun, but instead it's just another opportunity wasted.

Don't watch this movie.  Seriously, just don't.  The original is streaming on Netflix right now.  Go watch that instead.  It's just like the remaquel (premake?) except that instead of sucking, it's fucking great.


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Title: The Thing (2011)
Director: Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.
Starring: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Joel Edgerton, Eric Christian Olsen, Adewale Akinnouye Agbaje, Ulrich Thomsen
Year Of Release: 2011
Viewing Method: HBO HD