Recent films dive into the profound grief experienced by so many families. What do they still get wrong?
The first words in the film trailer, spoken over ominous piano, come from a doctor with a grim prognosis. “I’m going to level with you, Molly,” he says. “Opioids have a 97 percent relapse rate.” This is an exaggeration, but it has its effect on Molly and her mother, Deb. Deb is a deer in headlights, eyes wrinkled from years of worryand mistrust. Molly looks like Kurt Cobain in zombie makeup: unbuttoned flannel, skeletal frame, sunken eyes, bleached hair, pallid complexion. “You have gone through this 15 times,” the doctor says, and then there’s a fast cut to Molly in a twin bed, twitching in the fetal position, withdrawing from opioids.
Next comes the premise. There is a monthly injection, the doctor explains, that “essentially makes you immune to getting high,” locking the brain’s opioid receptors behind a chemical cage not even heroin can penetrate. But there’s a catch. Before getting this injection of naltrexone, Molly must remain opioid-free for a week; otherwise, it could precipitate a severe sickness. Molly dreads this trial: “Four more days? Seriously?” We see a series of tense vignettes between mother and daughter, with Molly, played by Mila Kunis, screaming at Deb, played by Glenn Close: “I’m so sorry that my drug addiction is so incredibly difficult on you!”
According to the C.D.C.’s provisional data, more than 90,000 Americans died from drug overdoses between October 2019 and September 2020, the highest rate ever recorded. Dramas about the addictions behind that number may not be fun to watch, but they do feel necessary, given the profound real-world grief they represent. Statistics make us aware of a crisis; art can help us metabolize it.
And yet: When this trailer for Hollywood’s newest addiction drama — Kunis and Close in “Four Good Days” — emerged, and my Twitter feed lit up with commentary, most of it was biting. “There are a lot of bad movies about addiction, and this one seems ready to blow them all out of the water,” tweeted an emergency-medicine physician in Ohio. “I watched this on mute and my god … the camera angles and lighting are every addiction movie cliché ever,” another advocate replied.
That was Twitter. In the YouTube comments, I found a parallel universe. “The trailer had me in tears, spot on if you or anyone you love has dealt with any type of addiction,” one commenter wrote. “Them first 4 days are literally the worst,” another said. “This is such a good concept.”
Hollywood has produced many vivid tales of druggy debauchery, especially about heroin. In the 1990s, “The Basketball Diaries” and “Trainspotting” showed audiences characters who injected heroin in the seedy underworlds of New York and Glasgow. In the 1970s, you had stories like “The Panic in Needle Park,” in which Al Pacino plays a Manhattan heroin user who falls in love with an innocent young woman and gets her addicted too.
Today, many films about drugs have a different vibe. They take place not in cities but in upscale suburbs or in rural areas, and they tell their stories not from the perspective of drug users but of their terrified loved ones. Like “Ben Is Back,” “Beautiful Boy” and “Hillbilly Elegy” — some of Hollywood’s other swings at the opioid era — “Four Good Days” is ultimately a family drama about the power, and the limits, of a mother’s love.
Close and Kunis’s family dynamic has the kind of raw verisimilitude only talented actors can recreate. But if anything here were to be praised for realism, it wouldn’t be the drama; it would be the boredom. In between scenes both poignant and preachy, Molly languishes in her mother’s suburban home, smoking unenjoyed cigarettes in a plastic chair in the garage. Kicking heroin involves skull-crushing levels of boredom, tired but wide awake, no hope of feeling comfortable; they call it “kicking” because of the way your legs grow cramped and restless. When Molly’s not smoking in the garage, she’s twiddling her thumbs, biding her time.
Hollywood still needs to reduce a complex illness into something like a sports movie or boxing match.
But a Hollywood movie cannot just be about boredom. It requires a meaty emotional conflict, preferably one that can be resolved in a couple of hours. Deb, for instance, says she blames doctors who overprescribed painkillers for Molly’s addiction, but the audience later learns that she left her family and that Molly grew up in a volatile, loveless home. A daughter’s feeling abandoned by her mother, the mother’s blaming herself for her child’s addiction — here is something we can chew on.
The demands of mass-market Hollywood dramas seem almost engineered to prevent honest portrayals of addiction. The films now conceive of it as a medical illness instead of a moral failing, which is positive. But Hollywood still needs to reduce a complex illness into something like a sports movie or boxing match. Molly either wins or loses, gets high or not. Her illness must ultimately be conquered by valiant displays of will. She must survive a cold-turkey withdrawal while her mother, whom she has burned one too many times, musters her last ounces of support and compassion.
The harrowing withdrawal, with its days of hellish sweats, is the most obvious aspect of addiction to dramatize: a trial of grit from which the character emerges transformed. Perhaps this is why naltrexone seems to be a favorite among some of America’s drug-court judges, who may view withdrawal as its own form of redemptive punishment. Maintenance treatments are arguably more effective and don’t require patients to be sick for a week, but they do not follow the dramatic path in which a character must reach a gripping, life-altering crisis point.
Addiction, however, does not follow defined dramatic arcs. For some, treating it is a repetitive, yearslong process of trial and error. For others, it’s even more anticlimactic, and therapy and medication do the trick. Yes, some do recover after a cathartic breakthrough. But those stories tend not to bring viewers closer to addiction; if anything, they create distance, reducing tangles of human desire into melodrama and pity. You come away thinking, At least I’m not like that.
In stories about “Four Good Days,” critics have marveled at how Kunis is “unrecognizable” in her “transformation” into what Hollywood thinks a heroin user looks like. Molly is gaunt, with rotting teeth and scabs dotting her face — a severe case. The film implies that this is her make-or-break shot at recovery, that it all comes down to this one moment. You’re unlikely to see less sensational arcs in today’s Hollywood dramas: say, people who make their progress slowly, who falter, who benefit from harm reduction, who learn that recovery is about more than their own will to endure suffering, whose addiction isn’t even their biggest problem in life. Such stories could surely be interesting ones. But in order to tell them, Hollywood would need to kick a very old habit.
Source photographs: Screen grabs from YouTube
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
