The Lost Weekend: A Brilliant Darkness

Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend (1945).

“It’s like the doctor was just telling me—delirium is a disease of the night, so good night.” – Bellevue Nurse Bim, in The Lost Weekend.

The Lost Weekend, released November 29, 1945. Paramount Pictures. Directed by Billy Wilder, Produced by Charles Brackett, Screenplay by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, based on a novel by Charles Jackson. Cinematography by John Seitz. Edited by Doane Harrison. Music by Miklos Rozsa.  Duration: 101 minutes. Featuring Ray Milland and Jane Wyman, Phillip Terry, Howard Da Silva, Doris Dowling, Frank Faylen. Wilder has explained that part of what originally drew him to this material was having worked with Raymond Chandler on the screenplay for Double Indemnity, subsequent to Brackett’s brief vacation. Chandler had been a recovering alcoholic during that stint and claimed that the stress and tumult of his working relationship with Wilder (actually not that much different from Wilder’s relationship with Brackett) caused him to start drinking again to survive the collaboration. Wilder has claimed that he made the film, about a drunk with chronic writer’s black, at least partly in order to explain Chandler to himself.

One’s Company, Two’s a Crowd: that could be the business card logo of struggling novelist Don Birnam in The Lost Weekend, but also of his real life alter ego Charles Jackson, author of the novel on which Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett based their Academy Award-winning 1945 cinematic study of the struggle to outrun your own shadow. This unsettling masterpiece of internalized noir is an example of a certain brand of dark cinema at its finest, and when it was shown recently on the TCM network we got to see exactly why that is: it’s a kind of exotic corporate merger between personal and professional angst, exploring two competing compulsions, writing and drinking, and it takes no prisoners in exposing the raw nerve inhabiting and inhibiting the urge to tell stories. Ironically, it also demonstrated to Brackett and Wilder that, at least for the time being, they were stronger working in tandem than apart, despite the fact that they could barely stand being in the same room together.

Carol: Women Under Glass

Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett in Carol, directed by Todd Haynes.

For the first half of Carol it seems as if the director, Todd Haynes, is going to make it work. Haynes stepped into movies with one of the most startling curiosities of the eighties, a short called Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story populated by Barbie and Ken dolls, but at feature length his movies always seem theoretical – and rigged – like a doctoral dissertation you can’t get behind because it scrambles any instinctual reading of the material. That’s especially true of the project he returns to every two or three pictures, where he tries to replicate glossy Hollywood melodramas of the forties and fifties but moves into the foreground the subversive qualities that (some say) directors like Douglas Sirk slipped into the margins of their movies. Since I can’t take Sirk’s movies seriously, Haynes’ takes on them probably wouldn’t interest me much anyway. But he was certainly an entertainer, and though he asked his audience to accept some stupefying plot points, God knows he didn’t try to pass theory off as drama. Haynes’ most highly regarded film, Far from Heaven (2002), defied common sense at every narrative turn. His plan was to set the movie in the suburban 1950s with a Jane Wyman-type heroine (played by Julianne Moore, whose performance is the movie’s only saving grace) and give her a husband who’s a closeted homosexual and a lover who’s an African-American gardener. It might have been an interesting proposition, but not if the gardener (Dennis Haysbert) talked like he’d just time-traveled back from the twenty-first century and certainly not with Dennis Quaid as the husband. Haynes needed an actor who read as straight but who could be convincing as a gay man, like Brando in Reflections in a Golden Eye. (Or Taylor Kitsch in the second season of True Detective, who seemed to have based the early scenes in his performance on Brando in Huston’s movie.) Quaid is preposterously miscast – like, say, Michael Douglas as  Liberace in the TV movie Behind the Candelabra – so all you get is the idea of a straight man who’s secretly gay. And when Haynes throws in a butch little girl and an effeminate little boy as Moore and Quaid’s kids, the obvious reversal of sexual expectations becomes dopey and childish. It’s the by now familiar problem of drama that goes straight to the symbolic level before it’s been worked through on the narrative level. Far from Heaven flattered viewers by making them feel smart for getting what he was up to without engaging them in the storytelling.