This is about a film director, and so it’s both narrated and shot as if from the view of its vulgar and sometimes-funny protaganonist. The director in the movie is played by the director of the movie, Peter Howitt, whose last two jobs were the romantic-comedy Laws of Attraction and the lame Bond-Inspector Clouseau mélange Johnny English. This is another affair altogether. Profanity-spewing and cantankerous for much of the story, he’s an unconventional movie hero whose drunken misanthropy is only partially redeemed by his self-loathing. If anything, the movie could use a few more scenes of redemption in the early going. After all, he’s supposed to be charming enough to be a ladies’ man, even if he chalks it up to his status as the enfant terrible of the British cinema. But we don’t see much of his professional life either. What we do see is binge-drinking, trip to rehab, doctor’s admonishments, and courtship of his cellist wife (Saffron Burrows), all cleverly mixed up in time in a way that becomes clearer. The movie’s about more than alcoholism and sickness. It’s about the human connection that is the only thing that can replace alcohol for its main character, who is apparently based on Stuart Browne, the writer whose novel Howitt adapted. Clearly the movie was a labor of love for Howitt; the specificity of the story’s details and the character’s personality strongly suggested to me a work of biography. These details give a power to the film, though it’s possibly too long.
IMDB link
viewed and reviewed 4/6/08; screened at Philadelphia Film Festival
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