THE LOST WEEKEND (Billy Wilder, 1945) R

Reviewed: April 29th, 2002

It's a little past eight in the morning and I've just watched Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend. With most movies I'd go to sleep, write the review when I wake up. Not The Lost Weekend. I'll keep typing until my eyelids shut.

Billy Wilder died a month ago. He was one of last remaining grandmasters of the cinema, a man whose influence is probably felt on every single halfway decent filmmaker working today. Wilder invented rules. Wilder shaped what we now see on the screen each and every day. I couldn't possibly overstate his importance to cinema. I'm sure many would argue Wilder's the greatest writer/director who's ever lived and maybe even who ever will live. And who would want to take the side against them?

The Lost Weekend is a brilliant film. On the surface, it's also a simple film. It's about an alcoholic (Ray Milland) and his harrowing drinking binge over a long (I think it's supposed to be five days total) weekend. But it's also about quiet desperation. And failure. And lost dreams. And the power of love.

Wilder and Brackett's dialogue is perfection. Utter perfection. No one writes like this anymore, not cause it's outdated but because they can't.
"Don't wipe it away, Nat. Let me have my little vicious circle. You know, the circle is the perfect geometric figure. No end, no beginning." Inimitable.
"You should have seen her come in here last night looking for ya. Her eyes all rainy, and her mascara all washed away."
Every line multitasks, every line has a life of its own.
"Suddenly I'm above the ordinary. I'm competent. I'm walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls. I'm one of the great ones. I'm Michaelangelo, molding the beard of Moses. I'm Van Gogh painting pure sunlight."
The dialogue crackles.
"Pour it softly, pour it gently, and pour it to the brim."
Sparse and quick and terse and amazing.

It's astonishing to consider this film was made in 1945. It's not dated a bit. Wilder was the first filmmaker to tackle the formerly taboo subject of alcoholism and he did it with such ferocity and honesty (speaking of which, Weekend was shot on location) that he enabled The Lost Weekend to hold up for sixty years, probably for all time. Sure The Lost Weekend doesn't have the bleakness of Leaving Las Vegas and will undoubtedly seem relatively tame to many people in light of recent films like Requiem for a Dream, but they'd be missing the soul of this movie. The Lost Weekend doesn't need to be disgustingly gritty and dark to feel completely real. It still feels unyielding in all its own ways. It's the story of one man, one particular alcoholic. The desperation of Milland is as intense as anything I've ever seen on screen. If it doesn't bottom out quite as low as Nicholas Cage, so what? Maybe you or I, if we became raving drunks, wouldn't quite either.

Plus it's in the smaller touches that any loss of "current pitch black darkness realism" is more than made up for. Every single supporting character is a marvel to behold. They are all so splendidly well drawn. Even people with only two, three lines of dialogue. I was talking to a friend of mine about this recently. My friend was pointing out that that's one of the big things that separates the great filmmakers and the great films, from the lesser ones. The quality level of each and every supporting characterization. I agree.

Long after The Lost Weekend is over, you still remember Nat the bartender, you remember the pedestrian who tells Milland maybe the pawn shop is closed because somebody died, you remember the pawn broker who tells Milland it's Yom Kippur and the overly eager bathroom attendant and Bim the nurse and Milland's brother Wick and the strict, bookish coat check man and the landlady and the goodhearted, brokenhearted Gloria (I rarely remember character's names so imagine how strong an impression these minor characters must have made if I remember most of theirs). Wilder permanently stamps them into your brain from less than a minute of screentime.

I've been thinking about this for awhile, but I finally became convinced watching the film that there was a theatricality to film performances before the 1950s that justifiably seems foreign to most modern movie audiences. I guess Brando really did change the face of film acting. Ray Milland won an Oscar for his performance in The Lost Weekend and it's a super great, powerful one but it's not one we'd ever see in a film today (maybe that just makes it all the better to watch and bask in).

There's so many wondrous, pristine, pristine, yet simple visual payoffs in The Lost Weekend. The rings. The string. The shadow. God. I smile just thinking about them.

The romance... again, perfect. The note Jane Wyman leaves on Milland's door... EAT... CALL ME. CALL ME. CALL ME. Beautiful. Her relentlessness. Everything makes such sense. The relationship unfolds through two or three simple flashbacks and it's a textbook on how to use flashbacks to fill in characters in all the correct ways. The narrative is so clean. The circular aspect to their relationship. Very moving. Wyman rules. She just flat out rules. She hits all the right notes trying to save Milland without ever veering even close to melodrama. Sold.

Some might feel the closure at the end of the film is too easy. I strongly disagree. I propose there is no closure at all... just the illusion.

I said in a recent review that unsentimental always ages better than the opposite. And indeed, towards the very end of The Lost Weekend, Milland says to his love: "Stop being sentimental." No other filmmaker of the era would have ever had the courage and the understanding and the foresight to have written such a line besides Wilder (most still don't even today). All of Wilder's movies are like this, cynical (in the best possible way) and hardened and taut and withstanding. They're always there, unchanged.

My favorite filmmaker, Paul Thomas Anderson, was asked after he completed Magnolia, "what was the last movie you saw that you learned something from?" His response: "I watched Wilder's Ace in the Hole, a few nights ago and it inspired me to really go back and learn the good old fashioned rules of movie storytelling. I'll be watching a lot more Billy Wilder in my time off."

Good old fashioned rules of movie storytelling. Couldn't have said it better myself. That's Wilder. You can't ask for more. That's perfection.

Return home.