This is a naturalistic look at the problems ordinary people have in kicking hard drugs. By "ordinary", I mean that these are people who aren't denizens of the underworld. Drugs are around, yes, and they do get used, sometimes habitually, but the characters have jobs and children and cars and generally live working class lives. They're not Al Pacino in "The Panic in Needle Park," scooting around in search of a score and accusing his friends of "using my wake-up hit!" By "naturalistic", I mean that the dialog and incidents in which they are embedded are slow in tempo and don't sound or look "scripted." Nobody gives anybody else a lecture on dope. Nobody says anything like, "Either you control it or it controls YOU." No dramatic scenes of anyone going cold turkey. No violence of any kind. Practically no score.
At heart, it's Vera Farmiga's story. She's married to a guy who does occasional coke himself but is not sensitive. She has two little kids -- one of whom seems to be able to actually act. Farmiga enters one of those twelve-step programs to help her keep clean and forms a particular bond with one of the counselors. At her own initiation, the bond gets more intense, and she winds up taking a little honeymoon trip to the city with her. But in their motel room she playfully enters the room where he's taking a shower and finds him shooting heroin. "I just wanted it to be really good," he explains in a daze.
The pair are arrested during a traffic stop and when hubby discovers what's been going on, he throws her out. She loses her job at the supermarket checkout counter because when she was high, she was fast and accurate, but now, sober, she's slowed down, careless, and sometimes irritating.
Farmiga takes her kids and moves in with her ex-counselor, having no place else to go. He's supposed to be on methadone and maybe he is, but he's also doing some kind of anti-anxiety agent on top because he looks and acts high and takes short naps during the day. Finally she tells him to leave and he does. The end.
Vera Farmiga is quite a good actress. She has an idiosyncratically plain face that could lend itself to a variety of roles -- a long nose, a twisted mouth, and eyes that always seem a bit stricken. Nice figure too. The ex-counselor (Hugh Dillon) doesn't get to display his chops that much, not being the central figure, but he's got the right combination of shambling concern for others and sub-rosa perfidy. They're both good, but then no one in the film gives a sour performance.
The writing has some distinct touches. Farmiga visits a pet store and buys a corn snake (Elaphe gutatta) for her children. As the pet store manager says, it's a beautiful and well-tempered serpent, pale buff with burnt-orange blotches down its back. We get to see a lot of the snake in its glass terrarium. It's non-offensive -- silent, slow, maybe inquisitive. Beautiful. The last we see of it is when the kids drop a cute albino mouse into the terrarium. The two animals nose one another for a few second and then -- ZAP -- the snake snaps up the mouse in its jaws and covers it with coils. It's a constrictor and it smothers the mouse and eats it. This is known as an analogy. The beautiful well-tempered tame thing turns out to be the strangler of its innocent victim. This visual message is infinitely more effective than a dozen lectures on the danger of things that look and feel good for the moment but are ultimately lethal by their very nature.
Nobody exactly understands how addiction works, let alone how to get rid of it most effectively. There is the opponent process theory that we manufacture our own dope when we need it and the dope glues itself to receptors especially built into our nervous system to get us temporarily high when we need to be. Artificial dope gloms onto the same receptors. If used often enough, the artificial dope prompts the body to produce more and more receptors, and it keeps the nervous system in a steady state. If you stop the surges of artificial dope, all those extra receptors start crying out, "Where the hell is our DOPE?" And of course there are cultural factors at work, but moving to an Eskimo community might not work either. I've known users who lived in small towns near Nome, Alaska. You can get it anywhere there is a market demand. Maybe a small town in rural Utah might work, but ordinary people can't afford to do that, and the simple facts are that a user has a very difficult hand to play, as this film demonstrates.
At heart, it's Vera Farmiga's story. She's married to a guy who does occasional coke himself but is not sensitive. She has two little kids -- one of whom seems to be able to actually act. Farmiga enters one of those twelve-step programs to help her keep clean and forms a particular bond with one of the counselors. At her own initiation, the bond gets more intense, and she winds up taking a little honeymoon trip to the city with her. But in their motel room she playfully enters the room where he's taking a shower and finds him shooting heroin. "I just wanted it to be really good," he explains in a daze.
The pair are arrested during a traffic stop and when hubby discovers what's been going on, he throws her out. She loses her job at the supermarket checkout counter because when she was high, she was fast and accurate, but now, sober, she's slowed down, careless, and sometimes irritating.
Farmiga takes her kids and moves in with her ex-counselor, having no place else to go. He's supposed to be on methadone and maybe he is, but he's also doing some kind of anti-anxiety agent on top because he looks and acts high and takes short naps during the day. Finally she tells him to leave and he does. The end.
Vera Farmiga is quite a good actress. She has an idiosyncratically plain face that could lend itself to a variety of roles -- a long nose, a twisted mouth, and eyes that always seem a bit stricken. Nice figure too. The ex-counselor (Hugh Dillon) doesn't get to display his chops that much, not being the central figure, but he's got the right combination of shambling concern for others and sub-rosa perfidy. They're both good, but then no one in the film gives a sour performance.
The writing has some distinct touches. Farmiga visits a pet store and buys a corn snake (Elaphe gutatta) for her children. As the pet store manager says, it's a beautiful and well-tempered serpent, pale buff with burnt-orange blotches down its back. We get to see a lot of the snake in its glass terrarium. It's non-offensive -- silent, slow, maybe inquisitive. Beautiful. The last we see of it is when the kids drop a cute albino mouse into the terrarium. The two animals nose one another for a few second and then -- ZAP -- the snake snaps up the mouse in its jaws and covers it with coils. It's a constrictor and it smothers the mouse and eats it. This is known as an analogy. The beautiful well-tempered tame thing turns out to be the strangler of its innocent victim. This visual message is infinitely more effective than a dozen lectures on the danger of things that look and feel good for the moment but are ultimately lethal by their very nature.
Nobody exactly understands how addiction works, let alone how to get rid of it most effectively. There is the opponent process theory that we manufacture our own dope when we need it and the dope glues itself to receptors especially built into our nervous system to get us temporarily high when we need to be. Artificial dope gloms onto the same receptors. If used often enough, the artificial dope prompts the body to produce more and more receptors, and it keeps the nervous system in a steady state. If you stop the surges of artificial dope, all those extra receptors start crying out, "Where the hell is our DOPE?" And of course there are cultural factors at work, but moving to an Eskimo community might not work either. I've known users who lived in small towns near Nome, Alaska. You can get it anywhere there is a market demand. Maybe a small town in rural Utah might work, but ordinary people can't afford to do that, and the simple facts are that a user has a very difficult hand to play, as this film demonstrates.