Clean and Sober

Long, uneven, and perhaps oversimplified, Clean and Sober is nevertheless a strong and affecting movie, the kind that gives you the sense that, when the end credits roll, you’ve been through some kind of real journey.

The journey here is the sobering-up of a high-voltage real-estate broker, played by Michael Keaton. He begins the movie in deep trouble: He’s embezzled money from his company (and lost most of it in the stock market), his date is lying immobile from a cocaine-induced heart attack in his bed, and he’s addicted to coke and alcohol. But when he checks himself into a detox program, it isn’t to conquer, or even admit, his addiction; it’s to hide from the police while he thinks of a solution.

The film details his progress through the program and his eventual re-entry into the real world. He comes perilously close to blowing everything a couple of times, but hangs on with the help of an unsentimental counselor (Morgan Freeman), a milkshake-swigging Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor (M. Emmett Walsh), and especially a fellow addict (beautifully played by Kathy Baker).

In the final section of the film, he attempts to get Baker, a blue-collar worker with a blue vocabulary, out of her self-destructive relationship with a lout. This is the part of Tod Carroll’s screenplay that seems to bog down a bit and become excessively talky, but Baker (recently seen in the unintentional silliness of A Killing Affair) is so strong she carries the day.

Clean and Sober is reminiscent of such classic “getting straight” movies as The Lost Weekend and The Days of Wine and Roses, but with drugs added to the alcoholic mix. As in those films, the leading man has not been known for his dramatic acting (Ray Milland was a suave light leading man before he won the Oscar for Lost Weekend, and Jack Lemmon had a lightweight pedigree in film until Days).

Keaton’s performance is both superficial and authentic. He doesn’t bring anything new to the role, but the same manic energy he has in all his performances suggests the suicidal overdrive of this character. There’s a brilliant scene in which, desperate for cash, he calls his parents and asks them if he might have the money they were planning to leave him in their will.

First published in The Herald, August 1988

Another review cut off! Maybe in my final paragraph I predicted a Keaton run at – you know – Oscar gold, who knows. It seems more likely I would at least mention the film’s director, Glenn Gordon Caron, his first big-screen directing credit after creating the TV series Moonlighting, a show I liked a lot in its heyday. Kathy Baker was fantastic in her early appearances, and of course still is. This still feels like one of those “I’m a real actor” choices on Keaton’s part, during his first flush of stardom; but fair enough, he justifies it.