Coming up on three years sober, I have often wished I could find more drunks on film that hold up as believable failures, all the more spectacularly disappointing because they have the substance to have made more, to have chosen better, to have interrupted the downward spiral somewhere along the way. Appreciating that (a) we're culturally prone to overtalking diagnosed illnesses and (b) that's the point of these morality tales, a collective there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I, it's surprising we have so little by way of compelling boozer archetypes. Well at last, we have a drinking disaster to watch who is not just a clowning caricature (think Arthur or Bluto) or a rotten miscreant (Bukowski, anyone?).
Allora. Leave it to Tilda—brilliant, radiant Tilda—the versatile woman who has played Jadis here and Orlando there, to get a smart, defiant, pathetic, regressing alcoholic just right.
I cannot recommend this one enough. (Props to the miniature John C. Reilly who played opposite her and the poor lil pit bull who got typecast as a slum drone.)
