Review of Days of Wine and Roses (1963) by Edgar C — 15 Jun 2014

"They are not long, the days of wine and roses:

Out of a misty dream.

Our path emerges for a while, then closes.

Within a dream.

- Ernest Dowson, from "Vitae Summa Brevis" (1896).

A screwball comedy in the first act, a jazzy account of addictive self-destruction in the second act, and a thought-provoking melodrama in the third act... It is somewhat justifiable that the world got extremely excited with a phenomenon like Dr. No, got disturbed by the claustrophobic dementia of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and the Academy got touchy with a meaningful social commentary against racism and intolerance featured in To Kill a Mockingbird, but hidden beneath the shadows of major box office achievements, a superior testament of the power of love and family struggling against one of the most impactful sicknesses in modern society, alcoholism, was released in exactly the same year.

Since The Lost Weekend (1945), not a single film had treated alcoholism from the correct point of view: it is a sickness. It is easier to conceive it as an addiction, because everybody coins that term. The implications of "sickness", however, is much more complex, because it involves a process that begins with the self-acceptance of being sick. However, this is the first film, perhaps in the history of film (correct me if I am wrong and I'll edit it) that develops the entire recovery process of such addiction, not to say it masterfully handles melodrama with a powerful and convincing effect.

Blake Edwards almost perfectly mirrored the plot structure as a film process with the process of recovery from alcoholism. Featuring two powerhouse performances by Jack Lemmon, the outgoing adman of Public Relations, and Lee Remick, his wife who is brought down by his husband to "a boat in the middle of a sea of booze, which sank", this account is utter success. The relationship featured is that of self-destruction as both willingly agree to invite a third party to their threesome, a matter that becomes even more complicated given that, afterwards, they have a child, which starts to grow with a serious lack of parental care.

I am justifying the full rating for this film because of its versatility and its striking honesty in the depiction of its two main protagonists. It has that peculiar, overwhelming effect that effective melodramas have: 30 minutes before the movie ends, if you start remember the previous 90 minutes, you get nostalgic and it is the easiest thing to cry, because you care about the characters. You care because you feel their pain. You feel their pain because they are relatable. They are relatable because they feel human. This is the point in which the performances come in.

Featuring interesting cinematography that accentuates the disturbing aura of the madness caused by such pervasive sickness, and a conclusion that made audiences walk out of the theater basically rethinking their current state, Days of Wine and Roses is an unusually versatile classic jewel from the U.S. which seems to be simultaneously trying to nostalgically embrace the feeling of a Hollywood classic from the Golden Age while facing the days of the American counter-culture that was rising in the Technicolor horizon.

98/100.