The Lost Weekend

Mary Conti5.0

**Part of the Best Picture Project**Alcoholism is a trait that runs rampant through my family, and it ran with me as much as it did to some of my family members. I feel that you can not see exactly how bad it is until you hit rock bottom. In April 2010, I hit rock bottom. Similar to Don Birnam's experiences in The Lost Weekend I went on a bender for 5 days. I walked out of my apartment where I lived with my girlfriend (and my parents in the same building) and left. They had been concerned with how my consumption of alcohol had increased, while my attendance of school had dropped. I had come home to an apartment depreft of alcohol. I left furious, insistent that it was because I hated that they couldn't trust me. The truth was that I had become dependent.I went from bar to bar, and from the houses of various friends to various friends. I did whatever I could to get a drink. I would always make sure to have something on hand so I could wake up in the morning to have another drink. Eventually, the week became a haze. Time slipped from me. Everything was infinite, and yet my world was small and I felt alone. I did a lot of things I wasn't proud of. I hurt friends. I stole things. I damaged property. On the fifth day I woke up on a bench at a Denny's on Bird Rd. It was my first real sober moment. I saw what I was doing to myself. I went home to family, and cried. The following morning, I went to rehab to seek treatment. Today, I am better. I'm not without my bad days, but I will never hit that bottom ever again.Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend feels so desperately real to me. The way it treats that desperation. That sense of loneliness. That internal strife. The way it turns the mirror on yourself. The way it turns you into a monster. How the world manages to feel so small and how it traps you, suffocating your every breath.Don Birnam's alcoholic weekend binge is strikingly real, even in its more fantastical moments. The fear is real. The desperation real. Ray Milland's performance is real. It is all real.The Lost Weekend is a film that hits incredibly close to me and in that aspect, it's essentially a film that is very personal. But it couldn't work if Billy Wilder did not craft a film that seemed that real.

Ethan Colburn3.5

The Lost Weekend is about an alcoholic writer, and his weekend he lost on a bender.It’s got elements of noir but fundamentally it’s more of a character study. I wasn’t really expecting that performance from Ray Milland as well, who wasn’t at all on my radar. I’d never seen him in a lead role and he portrays hopelessness so well. While we’ve matured on our talks of addiction since the 40s, it is the portrayal of hopelessness that I think makes the movie unique. There’s no evidence that he has writing talent or has a career, and you understand his desire to commit suicide.Billy Wilder is one of my favorite directors, and while I appreciated this movie it doesn’t crack the top 5 for me. It’s odd to me that this is one of his two best picture winners, especially given its closeness to Double Indemnity and some of his other masterpieces.Very dark and interesting film. I’d highly recommend.

theriverjordan4.0

Who needs enemies, when you’ve got friends that make studio films about your raging alcoholism? That’s exactly the favor that director Billy Wilder paid to Raymond Chandler; ‘inspired’ by his difficulties working with the writer on “Double Indemnity.” While classified as a noir, “Weekend;” about a perpetually off-the-wagon, washed-up novelist (Chandler, in all but name), leans heavily into the melodrama. Wilder is too full of salt and vinegar to make the movie a morality tale, but it is at the very least a bitter warning. Ray Milland in the lead role turns in one of the most realistic portrayals of an alcoholic in all cinema. He and Wilder lead viewers through a litany of miseries real and imagined as Milland’s former prodigy of a writer drowns his mid-30s creative roadblock in liquor. Still, there’s something about “Weekend” that feels like Wilder didn’t get to play it as fast and loose as he could have. Due to the era’s censorship, the gay tendencies of the lead character had to be stifled; that, and he doesn’t sink to the violent lows of his counterpart in the original novel. It makes for a film that goes down smooth, with a bitter aftertaste that doesn’t linger for nearly as long as one would hope from a Wilder film.