I watched The Lost Weekend a couple of days ago, and I’m still not sure what to say about it, other than I can’t imagine how it won Best Picture. The whole time I was watching it, I felt like I was watching an early attempt at surrealism that was doubling as a public service announcement. I was following along with the story, but also looking at the cinematography and the production design to try and figure out what made this movie special enough to be named the best film of the year. I must admit that even after thinking about it for two full days, I’m at a loss.

The Lost Weekend is about a failed writer named Don Birnam (Ray Milland) who has sunk to the depths of alcoholism. He lives with his brother Wick in New York City and the two of them have planned a weekend to the country to see their family and get Don away from the temptations of the city. However even as they pack, Don is trying every way he can think of to sneak a sip of rye whiskey. Don’s girlfriend (or maybe ex-girlfriend) Helen St. James (Jane Wyman) shows up and Don comes up with a ruse to get the two of them to go to the movies together. He then steals the money that was set aside for the house keeper and makes his way to the local pub where he drinks and continues to drink to the point where he’s drunk and misses his train. He happily discovers that his brother is done enabling him and has gone away by himself.

That kicks off a lost weekend of drunkenness and self-discovery as Don hits rock bottom. We watch Don go through all of the stereotypical things that alcoholics do, like lie to the ones they love, or steal from strangers or take personal affects to local pawn shops in order to get enough money to buy more liquor. Through a series of flashbacks and a whole lot of dialogue, we see the origins of Don’s alcoholism. This coincided with him meeting Helen, and we also see how Wick became his enabler. As the story progresses we learn that there are two Dons. There’s the Don that was once a promising writer and a fun person to be around. Then there’s the Don who drinks. That’s the Don who tells the other Don that he’s nothing more than a failure and might as well stop trying to succeed. Alcohol has never said no and never let him down. It will always be there for him. That is until it isn’t and he has to desperately find ways to acquire it. At one point in his past, Don had a gun and was ready to kill himself but the other Don convinced him to have a drink beforehand and he got so drunk that he forgot to kill himself.

I’m sure that for its time this film was very edgy. It tackles some very serious subject matter that was very taboo in the forties. It could have been the type of film that created a very dramatic atmosphere and had an ending that should have been very successful. Unfortunately the story was told in a way that I’m not particularly a fan of, and it caused the entire storyline to be very disjointed and all of the characters to be unsympathetic.

Billy Wilder directed this film, and while I haven’t seen all of his films, I’ve seen quite a few of them. This is the first film of his that I’ve watched and not liked. Indeed, Billy Wilder has directed and/or written some of the greatest films in the history of American cinema, but he missed badly on this one. The premise is very good, and as I mentioned, rather avant garde for the time. The filmmaking style is particularly avant garde as well, which does fit in with the mental state of a person struggling with alcoholism. What that avant garde style of filmmaking also resulted in was a storyline that is staggered and non-linear. That in and of itself is not a bad thing. Plenty of amazing films have been told in non-linear ways, but they all had other things happening in the stories that allowed the audience to connect.

What a non-linear story needs are characters that the audience will care about and root for. Even if those characters are less than perfect, the audience needs to root for them. What we have in this story is an alcoholic and his enablers. The only character who finally stands up and says enough is enough, walks out on the movie and only returns in a flashback. But Helen is a complete enabler, even though she tries to stay away. The bartender, Nat, keeps telling him to stop drinking even as he pours him more drinks. The barfly Gloria seems completely enamored with him but we’re never given a good reason why this would be the case. The one character who doesn’t enable Don is ‘Bim’ Nolan, the nurse at the rehab center that Don ends up in after a fall. The problem with ‘Bim’ is that Frank Faylen (you know him as Ernie the taxi driver in It’s a Wonderful Life) played him with a kind of sinister insanity that takes away any rooting interest in him.

Even Don is completely unsympathetic right from the beginning. The first thing we see him do is lie to his brother and girlfriend and then betray both of their trust. What we end up with is a film where we watch a man we don’t care about self-destruct. At the very least we should care about Helen and root for Don to get himself together for her. The problem is that there’s no reason to root for that. Helen would be much better off without him, and Don even admits it. We never see a time through the flashbacks where Don did anything that would make Helen’s life better. Had we seen something like that, had we seen an example of how Helen needs a healthy Don in her life to make her happy, then we could root for Don to get the help he needs to get his alcoholism under control so that they can be happy together. However, we as an audience are never given any reason to care about that, and the film suffers because of it.

If this film sounds like an old-school version of Leaving Las Vegas, it is. The difference is that Leaving Las Vegas gave us characters that we cared about and elicitedgenuine emotional reactions from audiences who cared about what happened to Ben Sanderson and Sera. The Lost Weekend tried to, but became too much of a serialized PSA to allow us an emotional connection.

Did the Academy get it right?

You can probably guess by now that my answer is no, and you’d be correct. Two film in particular that were nominated against it were more deserving, and those films were Mildred Pierce and Spellbound. Sometimes in basketball you get what’s called a “make-up call”. That’s when a player comes down the court and is called for a foul that he didn’t commit. It was a bad call against him. Later in the game he may commit an obvious foul that doesn’t get called because the referees are making it up to him for the bad call against him earlier in the game. That’s a “make-up” call. Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity should have won Best Motion Picture the previous year but didn’t. I wonder if the Academy tried a “make-up” call by awarding him the Oscar this year for an inferior film, because that seems to me to be what happened. The problem is that in basketball a “make-up” call restored balance to the competition. At the Oscars, it’s just the wrong call.