Ways To Ruin Your Film: Alcoholics

While recently watching the very fun movie, Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, I was ticked off at what I consider one of the worst clichés ever: The struggling alcoholic.

Here's the example from Dirty Mary Crazy Larry: Deke (Adam Roarke) is holding the wife and daughter of a supermarket manager hostage while Larry (Peter Fonda) collects the money. While waiting for Larry to call, we get a beautiful use of the Kuleshov Effect:

CU of Deke looking at something.
CU of a few bottles of liquor and glasses.
CU of Deke still looking.

Within those three shots, we instantly know that Deke is supposed to be an alkie and is struggling with staying sober. We can also safely assume that in some point during the film, Deke will also be very tempted to take a drink, but most likely will choose sobriety at the last moment of a long, internal struggle. If we're especially lucky, we'll be treated to a shot of Deke throwing the glass against the wall and wiping cold sweat from his brow.

Okay, we don't get the glass smashing, but we get everything else.

The biggest problem with most movies that include an alcoholic character is that the film doesn't benefit from the addition. Making a character a recovering alkie is a cheap and easy way to give that character "dimension". In Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, Deke's character doesn't really have any depth to him. He's obviously the brains of the operation and he keeps their car running with his mechanical expertise, but outside of that, there's nothing to his character that hints to his humanity. Well, instead of trying to figure out how to improve the character and make him fuller, why not just say that he has a drinking problem? We'll show him struggling with it a couple of times and we're good to go.

At one point in the film, Larry decides to wait out the cops. They hide out at a bar. A bar. If you have an alcoholic friend, the last place you're taking him is a bar. That is, unless you really need that obligatory scene of the alcoholic struggling with the urge to drink.

If you have a character that's a little flat and you need to give them some depth, find something that may have more relevance to the story's theme. Maybe you have a character in a romantic comedy where the theme is that we have to open ourselves up to people to find love and fulfillment. Let's say this character is the buddy of the film's hero, but aside from some comedic dialogue, there's nothing being added here. Well, you could cop out and make him a struggling alcoholic complete with cool glass-smashing scene, or you could have him be someone who lost the love of his life because he was always so guarded, yet he never learned the error of his ways, so he advises the hero to close himself off.

If you have to have an alcoholic character, please make the addiction relevant to the story. Look at films like The Verdict and Clean & Sober for references to this.