Portrait of an Alcoholic (The Lost Weekend review)

The Lost Weekend
*****

Next to Casablanca (1943), The Lost Weekend is the second oldest movie I have ever seen. At least as far as I can remember. Seeing Casablanca several months ago if anything was an experience opposite of what it was meant to be. I found it to be, even  with it’s status as one of the best, to be one of the worst movies I have ever seen. Acting in my opinion is the best thing to look for in a movie. If the film has bad acting in it, than surely it’s not a good movie overall. Casablanca has plenty of acting that anyone could do because it’s not acting at all, but a mere delivery of bad lines. That experience alone made me never want to look back past 1980 in film history. I was very reluctant this summer to compose a list of older movies, and even more skeptical to start the list with a movie from 1945. Could all classical movies be swarmed with the Casablanca ill-acting? I was about to find out.

I picked The Lost Weekend at random from the book The Academy Awards: The Complete Unofficial History by Jim Piazza and Gail Kinn, a book I consider to be my bible. I simply opened a page at random and by luck it was on the year 1945 where The  Lost Weekend, a winner of four Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director,  grabbed my attention. The film won Billy Wilder an Oscar for Best Director, and Ray Milland for Best Performance By An Actor In A Leading Role. With all fours Oscars rightfully deserved, the film is a character study of a man in grip of alcohol.

The film spans a weekend on the life of Don Birnam (Ray Milland), an alcoholic. It is wonderful to see such great character development so far back in movie time. Don Birnam is a weak man, always going back for another drink.

The film opens with Wick (Phillip Terry), Don’s brother, and Don (Ray Milland) packing and readying themselves to go out of town for the weekend. As soon as Wick leaves sight of Don, we see Don grab a bottle of rye whisky hanging from the window by a string. As comical as it may seem, this simple act proves the characters eagerness and anxiety to have a drink. Don wants a drink and nothing else, so desperate he finds ingenious ways to hide alcohol.

Don is also in love with Helen St. James (Jane Wyman), but this is all under whelmed by his constant drinking.  She is madly in love with him and shows undying determination to help Don. She puts up with him and his constant absence. She, I guess could be said is somewhat blindly in love with him. Of anyone she is the only one who sees talent and ambition in Don, something barely there, clouded by the fog of alcohol on which Don’s life revolves around.

We see Don through the course of four days. He drinks almost all day everyday, and we see him visit Nat’s Bar daily. Owned by Nat (Howard Da Silva) a man who might be his only friend outside his own brother Wick and love Helen. Some would argue; what kind of friend hands shot after shot to an alcoholic at the brink of perdition? I still felt that Nat in his own way did more for Don than anyone. A drunk wants to be listened to and Nat did that more than anyone else. At one point, even if momentarily, Nat encourages Don to finally write a novel he’s been meaning to write about his own life and love with Helen. A novel that is nothing more than an autobiography and appropriately titled “The Bottle”.

Don starts out eager to get a hold of a drink after drink, but soon it becomes the other way around, the drinking clearly is the one taking a hold of him. Don becomes so lost in the rye whisky that at one instance he hides a bottle of it, and later can’t remember for the life of him where he placed it. At a restaurant/bar he goes to such extreme as to steal from a young woman just to afford another drink. In his worst Don imagines a bat eating a rat coming out of a whole in the wall that was never there. We see a man loose almost everyone, the few who genuinely cared about him, and himself.

The Lost Weekend is a beautiful portrait of a man lost in addiction. The film is equally well acted by the entire cast. It is too brilliantly directed by Billy Wilder, and is edited in the classical continuity style, a staple of cinema I intent to incorporate in ninety percent of my films. The cinematography contains such exquisite details like the circles of water left by the perspiration of a shot glass on the wooden bar. A detail that cleverly allows us to get the magnitude of how much alcohol Don has consumed. This film as old as it may be, and with it’s lack in rawness such as profanity, sex, and even violence manages to capture an extremely accurate portrait of what it’s like to be an alcoholic. The Lost Weekend is a film that will surely grace the high end of my list of Best Films I Have Ever Seen, and remain there without a doubt.