Perhaps it's inevitable that a film that appeared so shocking and candid 60 years ago would seem so hopelessly out of touch with reality today, but I don't think the ultimate failure of this film can be blamed on the passing of time alone. Billy Wilder was a fantastic director, making movies that at the time were so much more intelligent and sophisticated than their peers, so I think he simply stumbled when making this overly-simplified message movie.
To be sure, Wilder does bring some creative vision to this story of a raging alcoholic struggling through his addictive demons for one long weekend. He uses the cinematic equivalent of first-person narrative to get you into Ray Milland's mind, and tries to make the audience feel what it's like when alcohol is the focus of your world. Thus, at a performance of "La Traviata," instead of filming the stage as it might appear to the audience watching the opera, Wilder cuts from shots of Milland's face to close-ups of the fake drinks the actors are holding as they perform. At other times, he even shoots scenes from the perspective of the alcohol, so when Milland tries to hide his booze from himself, we'll get shots of him storming around the room from the vantage point of the hidden bottles. But Milland gives a histrionic performance in the lead role, as cartoonish in its own way as Nicolas Cage's was in "Leaving Las Vegas," playing another hopeless alcoholic, and he undermines any effort at seriousness on Wilder's part. The alcohol itself is nearly personified to the point of caricature; I half expected to see a bottle of gin stand up and twirl its silent-film villain mustache while giving a dastardly laugh. And to top everything off, Milland delivers a ridiculous inspirational speech at the film's end, a call-to-arms for other silent alcoholics to emerge and begin overcoming their disease. After a whole movie in which alcoholism is depicted as a form of demonic possession, the ending makes it seem that the decision to quit drinking is as easy as changing from 2% milk to skim.
Still, this film should be commended for admitting that alcoholism IS a disease, and that it's not simply a lack of will power or self control that causes people to abuse. I can't think of a film before this one that really treated alcoholism seriously, or even addressed it at all. Think of all those 30s comedies ("The Thin Man" comes to mind) where hardly a scene goes by without the leading man holding a martini, or where the stumbling drunk is a stock character included for his comic potential.
So "The Lost Weekend" is a film that I can't whole-heartedly pan, because I do feel that points should be rewarded for trying to use cinema as a communication device for addressing social concerns, but if you know an alcoholic, I doubt you'll be able to do anything but laugh at the silly version of alcoholism you'll see here. Compared to other Billy Wilder films, this one seems almost bad.
Grade: C
To be sure, Wilder does bring some creative vision to this story of a raging alcoholic struggling through his addictive demons for one long weekend. He uses the cinematic equivalent of first-person narrative to get you into Ray Milland's mind, and tries to make the audience feel what it's like when alcohol is the focus of your world. Thus, at a performance of "La Traviata," instead of filming the stage as it might appear to the audience watching the opera, Wilder cuts from shots of Milland's face to close-ups of the fake drinks the actors are holding as they perform. At other times, he even shoots scenes from the perspective of the alcohol, so when Milland tries to hide his booze from himself, we'll get shots of him storming around the room from the vantage point of the hidden bottles. But Milland gives a histrionic performance in the lead role, as cartoonish in its own way as Nicolas Cage's was in "Leaving Las Vegas," playing another hopeless alcoholic, and he undermines any effort at seriousness on Wilder's part. The alcohol itself is nearly personified to the point of caricature; I half expected to see a bottle of gin stand up and twirl its silent-film villain mustache while giving a dastardly laugh. And to top everything off, Milland delivers a ridiculous inspirational speech at the film's end, a call-to-arms for other silent alcoholics to emerge and begin overcoming their disease. After a whole movie in which alcoholism is depicted as a form of demonic possession, the ending makes it seem that the decision to quit drinking is as easy as changing from 2% milk to skim.
Still, this film should be commended for admitting that alcoholism IS a disease, and that it's not simply a lack of will power or self control that causes people to abuse. I can't think of a film before this one that really treated alcoholism seriously, or even addressed it at all. Think of all those 30s comedies ("The Thin Man" comes to mind) where hardly a scene goes by without the leading man holding a martini, or where the stumbling drunk is a stock character included for his comic potential.
So "The Lost Weekend" is a film that I can't whole-heartedly pan, because I do feel that points should be rewarded for trying to use cinema as a communication device for addressing social concerns, but if you know an alcoholic, I doubt you'll be able to do anything but laugh at the silly version of alcoholism you'll see here. Compared to other Billy Wilder films, this one seems almost bad.
Grade: C