I’ve never been a subscriber to dry January: the month, with its stern back-to-business vibe and doubled-down winter chill, seems austere enough to me already. Yet whether you participate in the no-drinking game or not, January has become the month that compels us to consider our relationship to alcohol, how much space it takes in our lives, and what else can fill it.
Alcoholism is a condition the movies have always treated with varying levels of intensity – it’s somehow the addiction you’re allowed to make a comedy about – though the sober-minded, cautionary drinking drama has forever been a Hollywood mainstay. Nearly 80 years ago, Billy Wilder took a clutch of Oscars for The Lost Weekend, a then shocking, still potent portrait of an alcoholic New York writer (gutsily played by Ray Milland) on a bender that could prove fatal, if not for the love and intervention of a good woman. Exactly half a century later, Nicolas Cage won an Oscar for a more bleakly fatalistic version of a similar story in Leaving Las Vegas. As a suicidal screenwriter (it’s a rule of film storytelling that writers can never be happy) who heads to Sin City with the express intention of drinking himself to death, Cage’s bruised performance lends this awful mission a kind of dignity, matched by Elisabeth Shue as the sex worker who accepts him without seeking to save him.
