The Lost Weekend
It is interesting to observe how the role of the alcoholic has evolved from amusing chump at the beginning of this century to sick derelict at present. If ‘Chaplin’ is to be believed, Charlie secured his first critical film gig on the strength of his drunk act, and if one might extrapolate from such vintage jewels as The Thin Man, life in the twenties was a series of evanescent cocktails slurped hastily between romantic highjinks. Surely a modern film on alcoholism would wallow in relational dysfunction, physiological attrition, inhumanity and brutishness, ending with a wan smile, if the film were American, or perhaps merely a bloated corpse or two, if the film issued from the Vaterland.
Wilder seems to have been ahead of his time, or at least on the vanguard of the shift. ‘The Lost Weekend’ recounts the story of a talented man venting his failure on drink, shattering himself, his talent, and his family in the process. It is a sketch, however benign, of diminishment and loss; it is a film that winnows drunkenness from its humorous trappings and paints its victims as weak, hurtful, wasted beings. But it is a mark of this film’s era that it combines a novel realism with a cinematographic finish that renders it a fun film to watch—hurt feelings are quickly shunted off screen, lost loves forgotten, screams, nightmares, tremors rapidly annealed by the break of day. Bernam is a creative and brilliant man whose good looks, vivid imagination, and lofty ambitions conceal and distort the magnitude of his caddishness. We end titillated but unshaken, enjoying the voyer’s vice of having been privy to something that didn’t concern us, to what might, in the final analysis, amount to little more than a damn good mockup.
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