BEFORE: I got out and about yesterday, my wife had to go into Manhattan for a minor medical thing, and I offered to go with her. Of course, I didn't realize that the hospital wouldn't allow me to go in with her, but honestly, I was just happy to spend some time outside the house. I sat on a bench in Union Square for an hour with a magazine or two, after walking into an OPEN Dunkin Donuts store and buying a large iced coffee from a real person, not through an app. It was kind of weird. I imagine that once we can sit in a restaurant again and order food to eat there, that's going to feel weird too. But we used to do things like that all the time, right?
OK, last call for Timothée Chalamet, as he carries over from "The King". Well, actually it's not, because he's also in another film on my secondary watchlist, but it's a Christmas movie, I think. That would be ridiculous for me to watch that one here - I won't do it, not intentionally anyway. But he's bound to be in a bunch more upcoming films, like the "Dune" remake, which is still scheduled for December. Umm, we'll see. I have a feeling that I'll be busy that day, or I'll run out of slots or something - meaning there's just an outside chance of me seeing that right away.
I've got more pressing concerns, because tonight I start my march toward Father's Day, and this film about the relationship between a father and his drug-addicted son is as good a place to kick it off as any. I had a lot of choices this year for Father's Day films, and instead of saving some for next year, I'm just going to try to knock them all out and clear the category. There are at least ten upcoming films that I'm fairly sure focus on fathers, and there are probably a bunch more that I didn't count on that will tie in somehow - mothers and fathers are all over any random bunch of movies, right? Because every character has them, plus I've got some high-school/graduation films coming up, and all THOSE teen characters have parents, so this is bound to be easy. Father's Day is June 21, almost a month away, but here we go...it's still National Mental Health Month, too, does drug addiction fall under that umbrella?
THE PLOT: Based on a pair of memoirs from father and son David and Nic Sheff, this chronicles the heartbreaking and inspiring experiences of survival, relapse and recovery in a family coping with addiction over many years.
AFTER: I'm probably about as equally qualified to comment on the raising of a teenager as I am to comment on the topic of gay romance, which is to say, not qualified at all. Sure, I've seen other people go through it, but I've never been involved with teens first-hand. I watched my younger cousin ruin/enhance Christmas one year by telling his parents that he'd been drinking, doing drugs and having sex, which I think is the teenage trifecta. My uncle was most concerned about some of his collectibles in his liquor cabinet, which he figured were probably at least 50% water or iced tea at that point. (Pro tip - monitoring the liquid levels doesn't work.). My cousin now has three young kids who he sees only on the weekends, so in about 8 or 10 years he's probably going to realize what a bitch karma is.
Again, I'm not an expert, but I'm fairly sure that being the "cool dad" and sharing a joint with your son is the wrong way to go. On the other hand, "Just say no" doesn't really work either, because teens all have to find out for themselves what drugs they can and can't handle, and sometimes the only way through it is to do it. And come on, if they're not going to experiment in their teen years then they'll get to it during college, right? I don't have all the answers, but neither did David Sheff.
There's a ton of time-jumping here, and flashbacks within flashbacks - but this is not appropriate for a rehab story, because we, the audience, need to walk that journey with Nic, we can't just flash back to a tender incident from childhood when things get rough, we need to be in the moment with him, feeling the effects of the addiction. If there's a long, boring recovery period in a facility, we need to feel that too. And if there's a relapse or a setback, or some other bad news or tense times, we should be right there with him, instead of cutting way to something else.
It also messes with the cause and effect, which is crucial to a story such as this. Nic takes drugs, there are consequences, he's missing for the night. If he comes back home, then there are other consequences, it strains the relationship with his father and step-mother - there needs to be a proper order to things so we can follow him on his journey toward sobriety. Or relapse, if that's where his path should take him. The ups and downs of this journey are important, and shuffling them around like this just confuses the issue - you can't follow a good day with a bad day without some kind of explanation how we got from there to here.
Worse, there's unnecessary duplication - we see David Sheff at the start of the film, asking some basic questions about the nature of drug addiction from someone unseen. Then the film zips back to "One Year Earlier", but then this is the last title card we'll see with any kind of time-frame reference. Look, if you're going to have title cards to show the passage of time, either do it for the WHOLE movie, or not at all. Then shortly after going back "One Year Earlier", to a night when Nic didn't come home, his father starts having a flashback about putting him to bed when he was a small boy. So just a few minutes in, there are flashbacks-within-flashbacks. And you know how much I hate those.
The film then has to circle back to the starting point, to show us that conversation again, only the second time we find out who Mr. Sheff is talking to, and why. It's one of the few reference points on the film's timeline that we have, except for the occasional mention of how many days sober Nic has under his belt, but often the scene that references that number is followed by a relapse, and again, it would be great to know for sure if the relapse that follows the meeting does in fact follow right after, or whether we've jumped around in time once again. (So, DOES he have 485 days sober, or not? It's tough to tell if the character is really going to a meeting when he says that's where he's going, or if he's going out to score again. There are several times when he's seen driving while high, and that's why we need a proper framework and a linear time-table, so we can all get on the same page.)
This is all a trick to make me watch the film a second time, right? So I can properly figure out when everything depicted happened? Well, I'm not falling for that. According to the trivia section on IMDB, the editing here took 7 months, and was completely re-cut multiple times. That means, I suspect, that it was originally edited in proper chronological order, and for some reason, just didn't work. Either there were parts that seemed too depressing, or there wasn't enough dramatic tension by someone's standards. This supports my theory that the "randomizer" approach to storytelling is rarely justified artistically, and is most often used to cover perceived imperfections in a movie's story arc or pacing.
Another mistake was casting two young women who greatly resembled each other to play two separate love interests, Julia (the college girlfriend) and Lauren (the, um, post-college "break year" girlfriend?). Maybe this was my error, but I could have sworn they were the same character, and after I read the plot outline on Wikipedia did I realize they were two different girls. OK, maybe Nic had a "type", but a casting director still needs to make sure that two actresses don't resemble each other so closely, because that creates even more confusion in an already confusing non-linear timeline. The opposite problem occured with the three other actors cast to play Nic at different ages - 5, 8 and 12. For the most part I could believe that those young boys grew up to look like the 18-year old Nic, with one notable exception.
Look, I don't have all the answers here, but then, neither do the main characters. If rehab doesn't work, and trusting your teen to get help and go to meetings doesn't work, and getting your other family members to help show support or stage an intervention doesn't work, maybe sometimes you do have to write off a troubled teen and hope they find their own way back to sobriety. If you give them money and it turns out they're not using that money constructively, then it may make sense to cut them off - which simply has to be tough to do. This turned out to be a very complicated issue with no clear solution, so while I'm comfortable taking points off for all the problems that resulted from a non-linear presentation, I'm willing to give one back for handing a complex problem without getting overly preachy or simplistic.
Also starring Steve Carell (last seen in "Last Flag Flying"), Maura Tierney (last seen in "The Report"), Amy Ryan (last seen in "Late Night"), Kaitlyn Dever (last seen in "We Don't Belong Here"), Andre Royo (last seen in "The Spectacular Now"), Timothy Hutton (last seen in "All the Money in the World"), Amy Aquino (last seen in "In Good Company"), LisaGay Hamilton (last seen in "Ad Astra"), Amy Forsyth, Christian Convery, Oakley Bull, Carlee Maciel, Jack Dylan Grazer (last seen in "Shazam!"), Zachary Rifkin, Kue Lawrence, Stefanie Scott (last seen in "No Strings Attached"), Ricky Low.
RATING: 5 out of 10 disturbing drawings
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