Before Prozac, We Had White Irish Drinkers

If Eugene O'Neill were making movies today, he could do no better than White Irish Drinkers.

In fact, it was a line from O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night that rocketed into my brain only 20 minutes into the movie:

"None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever."

This subtle weave of cause-and-reaction, framed by choices, is what is too easily blurred in the living, and too hard to say in the telling, but it is what White Irish Drinkers gets exactly right.

And the result?  A truly rich and complex tapestry of a tale.

The story is anchored in working class Irish Brooklyn in 1975, and the movie carries with it the specificity of that time:  black lights, sideburns, plaid shirts and yes, even streaking.

What's the title about? Is this film about racism? In fact, it's not -- the issue never raises its ugly head.

Instead, this movie is about a time when so many of us were forced to choose between turning inward, to the comfort of our father's past, or the wide open (but terrifying) opportunity of the future.

Back then, the little decisions that we made without a moment's thought or understanding served to bend us to the trellis of our future lives. Did we hang out with the jocks or the brains, the drinkers or the stoners, the blue-collar or the white-collar?

In this world at this time, to declare yourself a "white Irish drinker" was to overtly chose the mantle of your father's past, place, and economic condition rather than the fearful future of integration, assimilation, and dope-smoking inebriation which glinted on the horizon.

I grew up in this period, if not this place, and I can tell you it was a different time; we had not yet gotten in touch with our inner child! 

In 1975, if you had a family member who drank to stupor, it was a private matter, and you coped with it by never having people come over to the house.  If fists were thrown and doors were broken, you did not call the police, and you might not even patch the door since it would only be broken again later.

In 1975, no one was prescribed a "mood stabilizer " or sentenced to a psychiatrist.  It was what it was, and if things got to be too much, you bunkered up in the basement or else you cranked up the music in your headphones, took to booze and dope yourself, or spent all your time out of the house fishing, playing sports, or working to save enough money to move the hell out of your parent's house.  Out of body and out of mind, and out of here were the watch words of the era.  In the end, of course, you were what your parents made you, but if you stayed that way, it was your own damn fault.

This is what White Irish Drinkers is all about -- that nexus between things that are done TO you and what is done BY you.... the intersection of forced fate and chosen future.

Because the plot of this movie revolves around a pair of Irish brothers and their plan to rob a 'For One Night Only' Rolling Stones concert, this film has been compared to The Town and The Fighter, but the comparisons do not do White Irish Drinkers justice.

The Town lost its potential for greatness and became another bit of Hollywood formula as soon as automatic weapons and bulletproof vests appeared.

As for The Fighter, it never managed to get me to care about the drug-addicted Dickie or his might-be-a-contender brother, Mickie. Nice try, but despite some great acting in a couple of roles, a little short of fabulous.

Fabulous is White Irish Drinkers.  Here you have characters presented with the complexity we associate with real people.

The two brothers (Nick Thurston and Geoffrey Wigdorthat) care about each other, and we care about them as well. 

Karen Allen, as the mother, is tired and scared, but she pushes back even as she sweeps up the glass. In her lightly-faded beauty and tiny worry lines you see the trace of choices taken and not taken.

Stephen Lang is a powerful force -- an electrical static that never leaves the house even when he is absent from it.  His character is a violent drunk whose own father shaped him with heavy hands.  Before Oprah, many of us thought this was what fatherhood was all about. 

As for Leslie Murphy, the love-and-lust interest of this movie, she is so perfect in the role I think I may have dated her 30 years ago despite that clear impossibility.

In the end, of course, all movies sink or swim based on their script, and it is the plot and characters developed by director John Gray that elevate White Irish Drinkers to that rarest of all levels -- a future American classic.

But hey, don't take my word for it.  Read the Vanity Fair review here, and go see this movie for yourself.  White Irish Drinkers opens March 25 in New York and Los Angeles, with other dates and locations to be announced. 

Check it out!
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