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DRINK, DRANK, DRUNK

Today's NYTimes Best 1176 Film was John Huston's take on Malcolm Lowry's novel

Under the Volcano (1984)

This rather upsetting, downer film is about alcoholism and shows one day in the life of a 24 hour maintenance drunk, Albert Finney, who has a rather complicated life on top of his drinking problem. At the end of his rope. Down and out in Cuernavaca, Mexico on the Day of the Dead, 1938.

Layered in here is a bunch of stuff about the day of the dead festival, Nazis causing mischief in Mexico, an ex wife who has returned after a divorce, a half brother who has had at the ex-wife before she was an ex and, at the end of the day, a long, too long, bottom in a whorehouse/cockfighting/midget-dwarf hangout with a horse who showed up earlier in the film with a dead rider. A lot of moving parts. Not a lot of them move.

Bummer.

Finney is first rate but, at the same time, is a caricature of the suicidal, terminal alcoholic. A bit too much British theater in his performance as much as I liked it.

He is given way too much latitude by the people around him, his ex-wife Jaqueline Bisset and his half brother (solves the "don't look alike" problem), Anthony Andrews. At the end, Finney runs into some folks who won't take any of his shit.

Huston does visual wonders with the scenery of Cuernavaca. At the beginning, we swim in color. At the end, we sink in darkness.

I am not sure why this is a Best Film, actually. It does have a rather good pedigree, being a Lowry novel and having Huston as the director, but it is tedious and drawn out and rather difficult to take seriously.

It does have a rather wonderful title sequence with skeleton marionettes with the liveliest music you can imagine. One expects a comedy rather than the melodrama that follows.

Incongruous.

Why is it that the most problematic Best Films generate the longest writeup? And it takes the longest time to write it too?

I wouldn't see it again, even for Finney's Oscar nommed performance. And I didn't like it much. That would make it a 2 out of Netflix5.

Labels: best films