Addiction in film today: more grit, less catharsis

An addict's story is one of the movies' favorite dramas, with its constant yearning, brief pleasures and nagging disappointments. Yet over the last few years the story has changed drastically.

In last year's "Down to the Bone," we watch as Vera Farmiga loses her job, neglects her children and generally ignores everything in search of a little more cocaine. In this year's "Clean," we see Maggie Cheung trying to reclaim custody of her child after a lifetime of thoughtless hedonism and high-grade heroin.

In the much-praised "Sherrybaby," the paroled Maggie Gyllenhaal comes home to reassemble her life but finds herself easily frustrated and constantly drawn back to drugs. In the just-released "Candy," Abbie Cornish can't wean herself from heroin even after she becomes pregnant.

The upcoming "Factory Girl" tells the cautionary true tale of Edie Sedgwick, an elegant fashion plate and wealthy Andy Warhol superstar who disappeared into a drug-induced haze and faded out, forgotten, at only 27.

These films have remarkably little in common with the showbiz melodramas that preceded them.

For one thing, they're centered on young women, most of them working-class mothers. For another, they offer no real resolution and only guarded hope. And that says as much about our changing (and also immutable) images of women as it does about our growing knowledge of addiction.

In early Hollywood, drugs and alcohol were usually the province of male comedians. Billy Wilder changed that in 1945 with "The Lost Weekend," a film so honest in its depiction of alcoholism that the liquor industry tried to get it shelved.

And yet as much as things changed, an older taboo remained in place. A woman could get tipsy for a comic scene — particularly if the drunkenness was accidental, and she stayed gaily scatterbrained. But a woman who seriously drank was almost always beyond redemption.

Time-worn tradition sees the woman as the home's anchor, a symbol of stability. A woman who drinks loses control, and a woman who can't control herself is capable of anything. She's something society, for its own health, must shun.

There were changes, eventually. The slow weakening of the censorious Production Code, beginning in the '50s, allowed drug addiction to be portrayed as honestly as alcoholism; the rise of feminism in the '70s changed, slowly, some of the double standards about female substance abuse. Yet even with those increased freedoms, and the problem's growing reach, big-studio stories about women and drugs have been rare.

Increasingly, though, independent filmmakers have taken on the subject of female addiction, and put it center stage. Whether it was the fearless Jennifer Jason Leigh staggering her way through "Georgia," the elegant Patricia Clarkson regally nodding over "High Art" or Ellen Burstyn and Jennifer Connelly spiraling separately out of control in "Requiem for a Dream," actresses interested in exploring the darkest shadows of life have found a home in gritty art-house pictures. Too edgy for Oscars, they still win plaudits for these performers.

As the genre has gained strength in recent years though, it's moved even further away from mainstream storytelling. The old Hollywood movies seized upon addiction as a ready-made three-act drama. In the first, an amusing (but troubled) character began to flirt with drugs; in the second he battled them on and off until a tragic hitting-bottom disaster; in the third, he slowly began to seek help. Often, one of the last scenes was set at a 12-step session, as he took his first step on the road back.

The new movies, however, not only have new, female characters — often carrying multiple addictions — but a modern disinterest in moralistic fables. In fact, by the time the film fades in, the second act is under way.

When "Down to the Bone" starts, Farmiga already has a habit and is close to losing her job; "Clean" starts with the fatal overdose of Cheung's rocker husband. In "Candy," Cornish and lover Heath Ledger are already hard-core heroin addicts. Maggie Gyllenhaal is clean and sober at the start of "Sherrybaby" — thanks to a stay in prison — but it isn't long before she starts using again, too.

Who were these people before the drugs took hold? We never know, perhaps because the characters themselves don't remember, or don't want to. Has Cornish's Candy, a talented art student, become an addict simply because of some misguided attraction to "edgy" bohemia? We're never told. Was Gyllenhaal lost the moment she moved into adolescence? (We see her father groping her now and can guess at what she suffered as a child.) Probably, yet we remain unsure — uncertain, even, that if we did know, it would explain anything.

Yet even as these women are clearly the leads (and, however damaged, still the leaders in their relationships), they're also still defined mostly by their motherhood. They have children to raise and with dead or missing or useless partners, that's a job that falls squarely on their shoulders. They're the ones who go out into the world to make money, waiting tables or cleaning houses or selling their bodies. They're the ones who try to provide.

Unfortunately for them — and tragically for their children — the job of being a parent is utterly at odds with the long-term commitment of being an addict. Parenting requires a kind of self-denial and selflessness that these people, in thrall only to getting that next dose, simply don't possess. Every one of them loves their children, but none of them seems to know how to love drugs less.

And so Farmiga is periodically separated from her kids by a stint in rehab, or a stay in jail; Cheung has to fight to regain custody from her in-laws; while Gyllenhaal is in a losing battle to reclaim her daughter from the sister-in-law who's raised her. Cornish doesn't have children, although she wants them — unfortunately, though, not enough to give up heroin even when pregnant. She ends up in the hospital, cradling the tiny, stillborn body in her arms.

These women try to be good parents, and they fall disastrously short, and yet interestingly even these independent, outside-the-mainstream movies blame them more for their failings than they blame their partners. The fathers we meet are all drug addicts too, but it's the women who bear the brunt of the parenting, and the full force of the guilt when things go wrong. We're still not that far from the bad-lady drunks of the '40s. A woman who loses control is not a woman who can be trusted.

Yet if these films mirror those old movies' moral double standards, they have a new uncertainty about their characters' fates. Just as these pictures dispense with Act I (this is how our heroine came to this), they disregard Act III as well (this is how everything was resolved). In fact, there is no resolution. Yes, by the end of each film, each heroine is — at that moment — off drugs. But there's no promise the same will be true tomorrow.

It can make these movies less than satisfying, dramatically — they're all conflict and no catharsis. Yet it also gives them a sense of awkward, inconvenient realism that earlier movies, with their happy endings to swelling music (or unhappy endings, with overdosed heroines) didn't have. They are as messy and unpredictable and erratic as addicts' lives. They know this is not just about life and death, but living. And in their final fade-outs, they end where recovery always begins: One day at a time.