Man, is this story familiar. A drug addict (a "polysubstance abuser" to your doctor) runs with some friends and lives the wild life from one high to the next. One companion ODs. The addict decides to go straight, leaves his loving but terminally addicted wife, enters a methadone program and gets a job, but his past catches up with him and he gets shot but, probably, will survive.
It has all the mythological constituents. Jack Lemon has been here before and Frank Sinatra and Al Pacino. And yet this is a movie of unusual originality. In fact, it's pretty good.
The script is well written, the direction individualized, and some of the performances are memorable.
There is a narration by Bob (Matt Dillon) that wobbles somewhere along the edge of insanity. The dialog brims over with irony. "A junkie will do anything to get over the problems of existence like tying your shoes in the morning," or something like that. "There seems to be no more room in the church for an elderly drug-addicted priest." "She left us an OD'd stiff which in this state is paramount to murder." (Paraphrases all, but it gives you the general idea.) It hardly matters how melodramatic the situation is because there is always a source of humor hidden somewhere inside it.
The direction can't be faulted either. Van Sandt not only moves the bodies around efficiently but know when to cut for maximum effect. At one point Dillon is in an attic trying to wrestle a dead body through an opening in order to pass it to his wife (Lynch) who is helping him from the room below. The corpse is dead weight and it slips out of his arms. He swears fiercely, there is a muffled thump, and when he peers out of the opening we see his wife pinned on the floor by the corpse. Now, there's nothing funny about maneuvering a dead body around, but if this had been a Laurel and Hardy movie and the object had been a piano? The temptation here must have been to show the body falling and Lynch collapsing under its weight, but the temptation to do it the easy way is avoided throughout the movie. Van Sandt inserts touches that aren't necessarily unique -- not after David Lynch -- but they are not overdone, they don't draw attention to themselves, and they tell us about the characters. If Van Sandt gives us closeups of drug vials early in the movie, he gives us closeups of a cup of tea after Dillon gets clean. Dillon's fantasies drift, sometimes computerized, across the screen -- double exposures of arrests and the bars of a jail cell, or dead leaves floating on water that somehow turn into silhouettes of people on horseback.
The performances are all good, but two are standouts. It's probably Matt Dillon's best performance. He has just hidden the dead body in the attic of a motel room and there is a knock on the door. He rushes to hide his stash and clean up, then opens the door to find the motel manager telling him he and his friends have to leave immediately because his room is reserved for a sheriff's convention. His expression hardly changes and yet we can see it morph from anxious concern to horror. He doesn't say a word.
I don't know whose idea it was to cast William S. Burroughs as the drug-addicted retired priest but it was inspired. He's unforgettable in his appearance, demeanor, and dialog (which he must himself have written). "Tom was a king," Dillon says of him. "Whenever he made a good score he made sure he passed it around to all the kids. His a** was covered in this life and the next." The first time we see him and Dillon meet in a crummy lobby, Burroughs twists slowly around in his seat (he's pretty old) and greets Dillon, saying, "That reminds me. I've been feeling a little sick lately. Are you holding?" I'm afraid I've made it sound like a comedy, but it isn't. The matter is a serious one and Van Sandt never really lets us forget it. It's just that he and the writers have brought a little Brechtian distance to the story that leaves us in awe of the foolishness and the humanity of the people we're watching.
It has all the mythological constituents. Jack Lemon has been here before and Frank Sinatra and Al Pacino. And yet this is a movie of unusual originality. In fact, it's pretty good.
The script is well written, the direction individualized, and some of the performances are memorable.
There is a narration by Bob (Matt Dillon) that wobbles somewhere along the edge of insanity. The dialog brims over with irony. "A junkie will do anything to get over the problems of existence like tying your shoes in the morning," or something like that. "There seems to be no more room in the church for an elderly drug-addicted priest." "She left us an OD'd stiff which in this state is paramount to murder." (Paraphrases all, but it gives you the general idea.) It hardly matters how melodramatic the situation is because there is always a source of humor hidden somewhere inside it.
The direction can't be faulted either. Van Sandt not only moves the bodies around efficiently but know when to cut for maximum effect. At one point Dillon is in an attic trying to wrestle a dead body through an opening in order to pass it to his wife (Lynch) who is helping him from the room below. The corpse is dead weight and it slips out of his arms. He swears fiercely, there is a muffled thump, and when he peers out of the opening we see his wife pinned on the floor by the corpse. Now, there's nothing funny about maneuvering a dead body around, but if this had been a Laurel and Hardy movie and the object had been a piano? The temptation here must have been to show the body falling and Lynch collapsing under its weight, but the temptation to do it the easy way is avoided throughout the movie. Van Sandt inserts touches that aren't necessarily unique -- not after David Lynch -- but they are not overdone, they don't draw attention to themselves, and they tell us about the characters. If Van Sandt gives us closeups of drug vials early in the movie, he gives us closeups of a cup of tea after Dillon gets clean. Dillon's fantasies drift, sometimes computerized, across the screen -- double exposures of arrests and the bars of a jail cell, or dead leaves floating on water that somehow turn into silhouettes of people on horseback.
The performances are all good, but two are standouts. It's probably Matt Dillon's best performance. He has just hidden the dead body in the attic of a motel room and there is a knock on the door. He rushes to hide his stash and clean up, then opens the door to find the motel manager telling him he and his friends have to leave immediately because his room is reserved for a sheriff's convention. His expression hardly changes and yet we can see it morph from anxious concern to horror. He doesn't say a word.
I don't know whose idea it was to cast William S. Burroughs as the drug-addicted retired priest but it was inspired. He's unforgettable in his appearance, demeanor, and dialog (which he must himself have written). "Tom was a king," Dillon says of him. "Whenever he made a good score he made sure he passed it around to all the kids. His a** was covered in this life and the next." The first time we see him and Dillon meet in a crummy lobby, Burroughs twists slowly around in his seat (he's pretty old) and greets Dillon, saying, "That reminds me. I've been feeling a little sick lately. Are you holding?" I'm afraid I've made it sound like a comedy, but it isn't. The matter is a serious one and Van Sandt never really lets us forget it. It's just that he and the writers have brought a little Brechtian distance to the story that leaves us in awe of the foolishness and the humanity of the people we're watching.