Film: Pickled in Paradise (review of Arthur)

Perhaps because I do not enjoy any liquor harder than wine or beer, I have never really appreciated movies centering on the humor or pathos—the mystique—of the heavy drinker. Actually, there have been at least three exceptions: The Lost Weekend, in which Ray Milland played an alcoholic with such elegant irony and almost poetic (yet not dishonest) despair; Come Back, Little Sheba, in which Burt Lancaster, always good when cast against type, reined himself in so fiercely into a lumbering gentleness; and Le Feu Follet (The Fire Within), Louis Malle’s best film, made from a novel by the fascinating Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, in which Maurice Ronet surpassed his own high standards with a performance of genius—maintaining a brittle surface charm behind which we could clearly perceive the loneliness, the terror, and the ache.

Consider, however, Arthur, the surprise comedy hit of the summer. I find this a shabby throwback to those Thirties films where, in the wake of Prohibition and the midst of the Depression, liquor appeared either as a triumphantly resuscitated phoenix or as the great panacea for economic woes. Hence crapulous, or even blind-drunk, protagonists assumed mythic stature, either for having brought back the grape from beyond the Styx or for having conquered the waters of Lethe the way Gertrude Ederle did those of the English Channel. Yet the figure of the Delightful or Tragic Drunk does not impose itself to me as ipso facto winning or heartbreaking—although a particular script and performance can sometimes make it so. I am inclined, quite pedestrianly, to perceive alcoholism as a sickness—not an admirable thing per se, and one that lends itself all too easily to exploitation through facile pathos or cheap laughs.

JS

About the Author

John Simon

Perhaps because I do not enjoy any liquor harder than wine or beer, I have never really appreciated movies centering on the humor or pathos—the mystique—of the heavy drinker. Actually, there have been at least three exceptions: The Lost Weekend, in which Ray Milland played an alcoholic with such elegant irony and almost poetic (yet not dishonest) despair; Come Back, Little Sheba, in which Burt Lancaster, always good when cast against type, reined himself in so fiercely into a lumbering gentleness; and Le Feu Follet (The Fire Within), Louis Malle’s best film, made from a novel by the fascinating Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, in which Maurice Ronet surpassed his own high standards with a performance of genius—maintaining a brittle surface charm behind which we could clearly perceive the loneliness, the terror, and the ache.

Consider, however, Arthur, the surprise comedy hit of the summer. I find this a shabby throwback to those Thirties films where, in the wake of Prohibition and the midst of the Depression, liquor appeared either as a triumphantly resuscitated phoenix or as the great panacea for economic woes. Hence crapulous, or even blind-drunk, protagonists assumed mythic stature, either for having brought back the grape from beyond the Styx or for having conquered the waters of Lethe the way Gertrude Ederle did those of the English Channel. Yet the figure of the Delightful or Tragic Drunk does not impose itself to me as ipso facto winning or heartbreaking—although a particular script and performance can sometimes make it so. I am inclined, quite pedestrianly, to perceive alcoholism as a sickness—not an admirable thing per se, and one that lends itself all too easily to exploitation through facile pathos or cheap laughs.