Smashed: Alcohol isn’t just the great social lubricant: it can also be the glue holding troubled relationships together in a state of inebriated dysfunction. In the powerful, uncompromising relationship drama Smashed,a hard-partying schoolteacher (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and her slacker music journalist husband (Aaron Paul) share a bond sealed through poisonous co-dependence and alcoholism.
Winstead fancies herself the life of the party, a fun and freewheeling drunk, but after bottoming out with a night of crack-fueled oblivion and feigning pregnancy in front of her class after vomiting profusely in front of them, Winstead is forced to admit she has a problem. The equally hard-drinking Paul isn’t willing to make any such concessions and bitterly resents his wife’s newfound sobriety. When Winstead enrolls in Alcoholics Anonymous at the behest of love-struck coworker Nick Offerman (who makes the mistake of confessing his feelings for Winstead in a memorably cringe-inducing monologue that prominently features the once and future Ron Swanson fantasizing out loud about what it would be like to be inside Winstead’s “moist pussy”), the boozy bond holding their marriage together begins to fall apart.
Paul and Winstead’s relationship is initially defined by mutual enabling and codependence that first passes for tenderness but morphs into something much darker and more unsettling once Winstead unsteadily embraces sobriety while Paul continues to lose himself in a boozy haze. To its credit, Smashed doesn’t posit Alcoholics Anonymous as a magic cure-all: sobriety creates its own set of problems above and beyond the rift it causes in Winstead and Paul’s marriage. If anything, Winstead’s life becomes more difficult after she stops drinking and is forced to face the mess she’s made without the crutch of beer or whiskey to fall back on.
Smashed is a film of pummeling intensity and bruised emotions, a refreshingly complex look at how one partner’s emotional development can play havoc with the other partner’s security and sense of self. It periodically recalls the equally punishing (in a good way) Blue Valentine, another unflinching look at a marriage in peril except for a misplaced subplot involving Winstead’s principal (Megan Mullally) getting way too excited about Winstead’s non-existent pregnancy. Mullally and her sitcom contrivances seems to belong in a sillier, more superficial film, not a brutally powerful drama that offers no easy answers, just a whole lot of difficult questions and ambiguity. (B+)
Save The Date: A film that opens with acclaimed graphic novelist Jeffrey Brown’s delightfully childlike drawings of cast members Lizzy Caplan, Alison Brie, Martin Starr, Mark Webber ,and Geoffrey Arend set to Wilco’s “Heavy Metal Drummer” ostensibly has nowhere to go but down, but Michael Mohan’s romantic comedy-drama Save The Date somehow manages to sustain that level of high-voltage charm throughout.
In a revelatory lead performance, Caplan stars as a bookstore manager and artist too hopelessly attached to her freedom to see moving in with adoring musician boyfriend Geoffrey Arend (the husband of Christina Hendricks) as anything but a compromise. She’s got her eye on the front door from the moment she moves in, so when Arend makes a spectacularly ill-timed, very public marriage proposal to Caplan at the end of one of his band’s shows, Caplan storms off without a word.
Arend is left a heartbroken open wound of a man, especially after Caplan moves out and takes up with a marine biologist played with puppy-dog earnestness by Mark Webber. He’s adorable, but then again so is pretty much everyone else in the film, including the always wonderful Alison Brie as Caplan’s engaged sister and Martin Starr as Brie’s fiancé and Arend’s drolly sarcastic but compassionate bandmate.
There are no heroes or villains in Save The Date,just good, sympathetic and wonderfully human characters trying to make the best of a situation that grows more complicated, impossible, and heartbreaking by the moment. Save The Date is an exquisitely bittersweet examination of the joys and perils of commitment, a swooningly romantic yet clear-eyed comedy-drama with a bracingly tough yet fragile heroine who remains sympathetic no matter how unsympathetically she behaves or how many hearts she breaks.
I saw Save The Date before departing for Sundance and again here today and I’m pleased to report the film doesn’t just hold up to a second viewing in less than a week; it actually improves. If the filmmakers had set out to make a film specifically for the A.V Club readership, they couldn’t have done a better job, and not just because Caplan spends much of the film in various stages of undress (though, you know, that certainly doesn’t hurt). Smart, funny, sexy, sad and refreshingly devoid of clichés, Save The Date occupies a higher evolutionary plane than most other wedding-themed romantic comedies. (A-)