User Reviews

Ah yes another movie about drug addicts. This movie is set in the Northwest US during 1971. It's a story about 4 friends who are addicts and get their stuff by robbing drugstores. They end up robbing them not by violent pistol holdups, but by usualy creating diversions while a friend sneaks behind a pharmacy counter to crack open drawers, or run into a hospital storage room to bust a cabinet with a crowbar.

The movie has a neat look and a neat story. It has to be the only movie about addicts that I have seen where the characters are neither glamorous nor do they look like they are festering with sores and pains and needle marks. I had to say though I was taken with the film, it has a neat story and has that American Beauty type ending (where the main character finaly makes it to redemption even if it is too late).

But it is a unique film and the movie has a look as if it was truly made in the 70's even though it wasn't. The movie starts off with Dillon being driven away in an ambulance as his voice over tells us about his life, and you feel that you know the story, but you don't as you watch the movie unfold and then realise at the end that the reason he is in the ambulance is not what you think is the obvious answer you thought of at the begining of the film.

Not the the best drug addict movie I have seen (I'd give that to the Canadian film 'H') but a very good film none the less.

Rating 7 1/2 out of 10

Man, is this story familiar. A drug addict (a "polysubstance abuser" to your doctor) runs with some friends and lives the wild life from one high to the next. One companion ODs. The addict decides to go straight, leaves his loving but terminally addicted wife, enters a methadone program and gets a job, but his past catches up with him and he gets shot but, probably, will survive.

It has all the mythological constituents. Jack Lemon has been here before and Frank Sinatra and Al Pacino. And yet this is a movie of unusual originality. In fact, it's pretty good.

The script is well written, the direction individualized, and some of the performances are memorable.

There is a narration by Bob (Matt Dillon) that wobbles somewhere along the edge of insanity. The dialog brims over with irony. "A junkie will do anything to get over the problems of existence like tying your shoes in the morning," or something like that. "There seems to be no more room in the church for an elderly drug-addicted priest." "She left us an OD'd stiff which in this state is paramount to murder." (Paraphrases all, but it gives you the general idea.) It hardly matters how melodramatic the situation is because there is always a source of humor hidden somewhere inside it.

The direction can't be faulted either. Van Sandt not only moves the bodies around efficiently but know when to cut for maximum effect. At one point Dillon is in an attic trying to wrestle a dead body through an opening in order to pass it to his wife (Lynch) who is helping him from the room below. The corpse is dead weight and it slips out of his arms. He swears fiercely, there is a muffled thump, and when he peers out of the opening we see his wife pinned on the floor by the corpse. Now, there's nothing funny about maneuvering a dead body around, but if this had been a Laurel and Hardy movie and the object had been a piano? The temptation here must have been to show the body falling and Lynch collapsing under its weight, but the temptation to do it the easy way is avoided throughout the movie. Van Sandt inserts touches that aren't necessarily unique -- not after David Lynch -- but they are not overdone, they don't draw attention to themselves, and they tell us about the characters. If Van Sandt gives us closeups of drug vials early in the movie, he gives us closeups of a cup of tea after Dillon gets clean. Dillon's fantasies drift, sometimes computerized, across the screen -- double exposures of arrests and the bars of a jail cell, or dead leaves floating on water that somehow turn into silhouettes of people on horseback.

The performances are all good, but two are standouts. It's probably Matt Dillon's best performance. He has just hidden the dead body in the attic of a motel room and there is a knock on the door. He rushes to hide his stash and clean up, then opens the door to find the motel manager telling him he and his friends have to leave immediately because his room is reserved for a sheriff's convention. His expression hardly changes and yet we can see it morph from anxious concern to horror. He doesn't say a word.

I don't know whose idea it was to cast William S. Burroughs as the drug-addicted retired priest but it was inspired. He's unforgettable in his appearance, demeanor, and dialog (which he must himself have written). "Tom was a king," Dillon says of him. "Whenever he made a good score he made sure he passed it around to all the kids. His a** was covered in this life and the next." The first time we see him and Dillon meet in a crummy lobby, Burroughs twists slowly around in his seat (he's pretty old) and greets Dillon, saying, "That reminds me. I've been feeling a little sick lately. Are you holding?" I'm afraid I've made it sound like a comedy, but it isn't. The matter is a serious one and Van Sandt never really lets us forget it. It's just that he and the writers have brought a little Brechtian distance to the story that leaves us in awe of the foolishness and the humanity of the people we're watching.

Off-beat, visionary film about dope fiend Dillon and his group of misfit drug addicts who go from drug store to drug store looking for the ultimate high. Gus Van Sant's critically acclaimed picture tells the story very well, with good performances from all his lead players. The plot is never riveting, but Van Sant gets you interested early and keeps you so throughout. "Cowboy" is a short film, either due to excessive editing, or the fact that Van Sant ran out of material, probably the more likely of the two.

The definite highlight of the movie is the visual and original cinematography, as we are confronted with some detailed and different camera shots. Worth a look.

Wednesday, April 15, 1992 - Video

From director Gus Van Sant (My Own Private Idaho, Good Will Hunting), I am sure that I tried of few minutes of this film and got bored, but having remembered the title for so long I was definitely willing to give it more of a chance. Basically highly suspicious Bob Hughes (Matt Dillon) and his wife Dianne (Kelly Lynch) are drug addicts, and are love doing various pharmaceutical drugs, like dilaudid, morphine and cocaine, and keep their habit going they and another couple often steal from pharmacies. They are aware a police officer is getting too close for comfort for them, so they move their operation to another town, but it isn't long after doing this that one of the crew overdoses and dies. They unintentionally have checked into a hotel where a sheriff's convention is taking place, but they do have to move the body from out of the hotel room to into their car, they narrowly avoid getting caught doing this. Believing his warnings is what caused the incident Bob decides he does need help, but he is too scared to join any methadone or any kind of drug eliminating program. Worse comes when junkies he saw earlier ambush his apartment and try to score drugs, and having decided to go straight he doesn't have anything for them to take, so they beat up and then shoot him, but in the end he lives long enough for an ambulance to take him away. Also starring James Remar as Gentry, James Le Gros as Rick, Heather Graham as Nadine, Beah Richards as Drug Counselor, Grace Zabriskie as Bob's Mother and Max Perlich as David. Dillon does well as the junkie who finds it very difficult to let go of his addiction and then later to even try to kick it, I admit I didn't feel as enraptured in this story like I did with Trainspotting, but the drug taking culture is definitely emphasised, not in a judgemental way, and there is interesting provocative material, so all in all it is a worthwhile drama. Very good!