I've been working on Step 1 and thinking about unmanageability in my own life and had one of those lovely moments of coincidence last weekend when my husband Mark and I went to see Burn After Reading, a funny, clever movie just drowning in unmanageable lives.WARNING: Spoilers from here on out!
(See, I bet you wish I had made you click over to the Second Road to read this one so you could avoid accidentally seeing them!)
John Malkovich plays an alcoholic who refuses to acknowledge he has a problem, even as his drinking gets him fired from his job at the CIA. His marriage falls apart, his wife locks him out of both the house and the bank account, and his checks start to bounce. Looking for both money and revenge, he breaks into his old home and goes straight for... Nope, not cash, jewelry or computers. He heads for the true valuables: the bottles of alcohol in the kitchen, where he fixes a drink and loads up a box full of booze.
But wait, there's more! What would a movie be for me without a sex addict? And it's got one in (Mm!) George Clooney, who spends the time he's not with his wife or with his mistress with women he meets on Internet dating sites. He's wonderfully (half) truthful about the fact that he's married; he claims to be in the midst of a divorce. And when he wants to bring another woman home, he even goes so far as to elaborately stage his house while his wife is out of town to make it appear that she's moving out. Of course, his wife has a detective following him, so it's only a matter of time before his double life comes crashing unmanageably down around him and his marriage falls apart for real.
The movie also does a fabulous job of capturing the ritualistic nature of sexual acting out, as Clooney's character takes a jog after each encounter and is even compulsive about the distance he needs to run. I was also delighted to find that while he had a hobby, that hobby was... building sex toys! Really, how many active addicts do you know who have time for non-addiction-related hobbies at the peak (or depth) of their addictions? And what Mark and I both really appreciated about this movie was that it able to show all of this without any gratuitous sex scenes.
Finally, what is an addiction movie without a starring codependent? And Frances McDormand is that codie. Desperate for affection, she has a series of plastic surgeries scheduled to change everything from her breasts to her vaccination scar. Over the course of the movie, she tries to use, change and control everyone around her in her attempt to pay for the surgeries that (she thinks) will bring her love and happiness. It's her need that drives the entire plot and spins the world around her into chaos, but (like any good codie in denial) she's quite oblivious. Go figure.
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