Days of Wine and Roses
The fact that I’m only now getting deep into the bulk of Jack Lemmon’s career is kind of tragic, but when you have several decades to catch up with, and need to keep up with modern cinema, that’s how it can go. I’m starting to catch up now, and that’s the important thing, and I’m glad that an upcoming episode of the podcast is inspiring me to continue in that process with Blake Edwards’s alcoholic drama. Since it also allows me to watch a new Blake Edwards film, as well, it’s a win-win for me.
Alcoholism and addiction can be a tricky thing for filmmakers to get right, on screen, and I’ll be honest, it’s hard to know whether Edwards- the maestro of the “Pink Panther” franchise and “10”- would be a person to right by the struggle in film. I’ll admit, there are times when the film, written by J.P. Miller from his teleplay, feels a little maudlin and “movie of the week,” but Edwards and Lemmon barrel head-long into the material, and play straight with it. One of the biggest things I’ve missed until recently is a bulk of Lemmon’s dramatic work, and I’m grateful that, now, I’m getting a larger look at the great actor’s work, and why it’s so inspiring to so many actors. “Days of Wine and Roses” is a brilliantly challenging film, with a Lemmon performance to match.
The film begins as Lemmon’s Joe Clay, a public relations man, is tasked with procuring women for a playboy client’s party. While heading out to the boat with the women he’s found, he meets, and awkwardly assumes she’s one of them, Kirsten Arnesen (Lee Remick), who is actually one of his bosses’s secretary. After he manages an apology, they go out on a date, and, eventually, get married and have a child together. But there’s a steady stream of drinking involved with their relationship that not only threatens to derail Joe’s career, but their home life as their behavior begins to get more and more destructive. How long until they manage to hit rock bottom.
As I mentioned earlier, I finally watched this film for an upcoming podcast, which is about some of an actor friend’s favorite performances. Lemmon’s in this film topped that list, and it’s very easy to see why. Up until last year, when I finally watched Billy Wilder’s equally-admired “The Apartment” with Lemmon, it was some of the actor’s later work in the last decade of his life, as well as Wilder’s “Some Like It Hot,” that I was familiar with. Watching “The Apartment” and “Days of Wine and Roses,” the greater depths of Lemmon’s talent, which I had only scratched the surface of, is starting to show itself to me, and there’s something truly special about the way he balanced serious drama with humor when a director gave him the opportunity to. Edwards plays it honestly with Miller’s screenplay, but the slapstick director of Inspector Clouseau’s adventures comes out in key moments of this film, as Lemmon’s physical talents are played not for laughs, but painful spirals downward for a character that can’t hold his liquor. There’s one scene, in particular, late in the film involving a drunken, late night trip to his father-in-law’s garden house that would be mawkishly melodramatic (or unintentionally hilarious) if it weren’t for the combined talents of Edwards and Lemmon wringing every painful truth out of the fact that this is Clay coming unglued, and destroying something important to a loved one, shattering their trust in him. When he starts going to AA meetings after being hospitalized after this moment, the film does tiptoe into further potentially mawkish storytelling, but the struggle Clay has with staying sober- and, most importantly, the fact that Kirsten can’t live with being sober- keeps the film anchored in the difficult reality of kicking an addiction, and the process of keeping a family together, and how sobriety doesn’t always assure that when only one person is getting clean, is immensely powerful as the film builds to its climax.
Lemmon is one of the all-time greats, in an all-time great performance, but the film wouldn’t be as good if Remick weren’t up for the challenge of going toe-to-toe with him, and she does it as well as anyone as a woman who, after a certain point, is scared of what a sober life would be like, even when Clay gets sober and is able to provide for their daughter again. Their final scene together is worthy of the Oscar nominations they received for this film alone, and, when combined with the music by Henry Mancini, it rings us out emotionally as we realize, along with Joe, that things may never be truly happy for this family again. I never would have guessed Edwards were capable of this type of filmmaking when I first watched “A Shot in the Dark” or “The Pink Panther,” but I’ll freely admit to being young and stupid then, as well, especially when it comes to underrating one of the great directors of all-time. Now, I know better, and I’m anxious to get started into further realizations about both actor and director here.
