Watching Billy Wilder's uncompromising, grim, and deeply unsettling The Lost Weekend, I was reminded of great episodes of the Twilight Zone. It wasn't just the eerie theremin music wafting through the background; it was the entire mood -- a mournful dirge on a member of humanity lost forever to a hidden and psychotic demon. In the case of Don Birnam (Ray Milland), this demon is alcohol, but for all intents and purposes it could have been anything. The genius of The Lost Weekend lies in its shocking honesty and its deep concern for its protagonist, who cycles painfully through self-deprecation, violence, hallucination, utter self-hatred, bizarre confidence, brutal honesty, and back again as he slips into bottle after bottle of rye, whiskey, and gin. Wilder the director is concerned with Birnam the sad and angry alcoholic not because he's the most fascinating character in the world, or because he's wholly redeemable (in most ways, he's completely unredeemable as a human being), but because he's so frighteningly real. At times, I forgot I was watching a film, and instead felt like I was looking through a muddy glass window into any bar on any street in any city in the country.
In bringing Birnam face to face with reality (including one night in a stark sanitarium filled with shrieking withdrawal sufferers and a planned rendezvous between his face and a pistol), we're reminded not of the grisly effects of alcoholism -- mind you, this is not a morality play or an expose as much as it is, simply, a pull-no-punches exploration of madness -- but of the power of film to convey the utter sadness and depravity of human beings when pushed to the edge. Wilder is so effective at conveying this dark truth that he is able to direct the audience's reaction with absolute precision (a talent he shared with Hitchcock, who directed the similarly dark but much more whimsical Rebecca); we are never allowed to feel schadenfreude for Birnam, nor are we ever allowed to truly identify with him. The Lost Weekend leaves us paralyzed, wishing we could do something to stop his pain and the pain of all who surround him, but watching with an unstoppable and sick fascination nevertheless. It is one of the great early Best Picture winners, and one of cinema's sickest and most compulsively watchable masterpieces about a train wreck of a human being. 9/10.
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