Subjectivist look at alcoholism featuring excellent performances from when Elisabeth SHUE and when Nicolas CAGE. The first-person narrative is a perfect vehicle to help us understand the morbid self-regard of those who cannot make worthwhile relationships with either themselves or others: Standing in a hole and digging oneself deeper in. the desperation to find oneself in others drives this narrative, along with the impossibility of attaining such a goal. The inevitable result is the self-destruction depicted here.
The style of this movie is very much a part of the story and helps the audience deal with the sheer awfulness of the characters and their loathsome self-pity. Oddly, this film starts to show signs of being a romance when it could never ever be any such thing. The emotional dependency of these schizophrenic characters simultaneously denies objective reality while desperately and vainly trying to connect with it. Meanwhile the film mostly succeeds in allowing us into their world without letting us forget that their world is the fantasy of the grown-up child trying to return to the womb.
Not quite as good as when Days of Wine & Roses or when Lost Weekend, because it offers no explanations nor understandings - but it comes close.
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