The Talkies/Dopes on Dope

...His reversal is thus both dramatically inert and ethically meaningless...

...The Coens' well-aimed ridicule distances them morally from their characters...

...The movie flounders badly, then...

...They play games...

...But why...

...Which is also part of the problem with this film: Bob doesn't quit drugs because he comes to realize that it's wrong for him to be robbing pharmacies, sponging off society, getting cops shot up, breaking his poor mother's heart, and so forth...

...36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 199...

...at Father Tom's pious gratitude for Bob's stash ("God bless you, my son, may you go to heaven") and his blunt dismissal of certain items contained therein ("This is for squares—never touch the stuff...

...What, one must ask, is Burroughs doing here...

...So Bob returns alone to Portland, takes a monotonous factory job, rents a grim little apartment, and goes on a 21-day methadone program...

...until its dramatically unsatisfying conclusion—a conclusion whose impact derives entirely from a graphically depicted act of violence, and whose intended irony falls completely flat because it presumes a level of sympathy for Bob, on the part of the audience, that is utterly inconceivable...

...Too bad...

...His transformation doesn't convince for a second...

...Well, somebody is...

...Yet its perspective on that world is more than a bit cockeyed...

...Not only does he lack a single redeeming feature...

...It's a disturbing bit of casting...

...It's part of the implicit argument of this movie, indeed, that drugs do make life seem beautiful, that in order to treat the subject of drug addiction realistically a filmmaker must begin by owning up to this fact, and that if there is a reason why you can't stick with drugs forever it's surely not that they fail to live up to their rep or that the obligatory criminality might eventually make you feel remorseful...

...The film offers, then, a vivid close-up view of the world it surveys...

...Bob's so eager to get his fix that he starts shooting up on the way home...

...Y et these touches of comedy seem frequently to be at odds with the film's non-comedic aims...

...in Drugstore Cowboy, by contrast, the gags pop up when least expected, and tend (in the "tradition" of Burroughs and his fellow Beats) to be pretentiously and pointlessly nihilistic...

...As he puts it: "I like drugs...

...meanwhile, Bob slips nimbly behind the prescription counter and empties a drawer full of controlled substances...

...For the most part, moreover, Robert Yeoman's photography is at once exquisite and appropriately naturalistic—though his terse, surrealistic representations of Bob's drug-induced euphoria feel clumsy and curiously old-fashioned...

...Dianne and Rick think he's crazy, and won't have anything to do with it...

...Are Van Sant and company suggesting that they want their film to be seen as a cinematic counterpart to Burroughs's appalling, amoral, egocentric novels...

...The movie has a weird tone, one that combines a TV movie-style earnestness about drug addiction with an irreverent, absurdist waggery about the subject...

...A scene early in the movie illustrates their modus operandi: Nadine distracts the druggist and his customers by faking an epileptic seizure near the doorway...

...But a dope fiend's got a pretty good idea...

...Whether because he has developed remarkably as an actor or because he has been allowed here to play a character who is shallow and inarticulate enough not to strain him beyond his limits, Matt Dillon is generally convincing as Bob...

...And, for a while, to Bob and company, the beauty of this drug-engendered escape from reality seems well worth all the trouble of knocking over Rexall's and getting hassled by the fuzz...

...a certain...

...Nadine—who has deliberately flouted the extraordinarily -superstitious Bob's injunction against putting a hat on a bed—dies of an overdose...

...Twentysix-year-old Bob Hughes (Matt Dillon), the eponymous hero of Drugstore Cowboy, is a full-time dope fiend...

...the scenes—Bob at work, Bob at an ex-junkie rap session, and so forth—follow each' other in a meaningless jumble...

...Why place this vile, unscrupulous old monster in the role of a gentle sage to whom Bob says, "You should've been a philosopher...

...This young man who doesn't give a moment's thought to anyone else (including the members of his makeTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1990 35 shift "family"), and for whose perfect insensitivity the filmmakers don't even try to hint at a coherent motivation, is impossible to care about...

...But once Bob returns to Portland the whole contraption falls apart...

...As long as it lasted, life was beautiful...

...Burroughs plays Tom Murphy, a ruminative, soft-spoken ex-priest who is "the most notorious dope fiend on the Coast" and whom Bob (a former altar boy) has known since his childhood...

...Rather, he quits because of an asinine superstition...

...I like the whole life-style...

...As he explains in retrospective voice-over, dope delivered him from the unpredictability of life: "Most people don't know what's going to happen next...

...despite their...

...after all his years of selfishness, is a direct consequence of the only two generous acts one sees him performing in the entire picture...

...Dianne helps keep attention away from the counter, and on the way out steals a paperback copy of Love Story from a rack (she's the literary one...

...The film tries to get you to laugh at all sorts of things, at the wacky as well as the grisly—at, for instance, Rick's unremitting literalmindedness...

...He stuck to the vow, you see, because he's so superstitious...

...Bruce Bawer is The American Spectator's movie reviewer...

...It's not till Bob and his friends leave Portland for a cross-country drive that things turn sour...

...If the Coen brothers (Blood Simple, Raising Arizona) are better than Van Sant at mocking the vapid and malevolent, it's because the Coens' jests are more sharply and insistently focused (it's always clear whom they're satirizingand why) and because their satire is given spirit and purpose by a keen, if highly idiosyncratic, moral faculty...

...And a dull jumble, for while the lawless, amoral, thug-addicted Bob of the earlier part of the film is at least interesting to watch, the drug-free Bob is downright boring...

...These kids have fun being junkies...

...Bob almost gets caught breaking into a hospital pharmacy...

...So are his wife, Dianne (Kelly Lynch), his sidekick, Rick (James Le Gross), and Rick's girlfriend, Nadine (Heather Graham...

...heavy use of narcotics, art as pretty as can be, and look young foi their ages to boot...

...For example, when two plainclothesmen stake out their second-floor pad from a ladder, Bob tells a neighbor that one of the cops is a peeping torn, and the neighbor—who, quite conveniently, proves to be the neighborhood maniac—blows the lawman away with a rifle...

...For another thing, Bob and Dianne...

...Certainly some of the film's "wisdom" (e.g., "You can buck the system, but you can't buck the deep forces that lie beneath the surface") sounds suspiciously like the kind of fatuously anarchic and penny-ante mystical nonsense that Burroughs serves up in his books...

...at the way Bob, walking into a room to find Nadine dead, barks, "Who left this hat on the bed...

...James Remar, for his part, is very fine as a tenacious Portland cop named Gentry who takes a provocative but ultimately implausible interest in Bob...

...For one thing, the picture opens with a tenderly nostalgic vocal arrangement of the wonderful standard "For All We Know," the romanticism of which may well be intended ironically, though it doesn't come off that way...

...You get the feeling that the filmmakers think there's something potent and honest and unsentimental about their morally neutral, self-centered vision of life, about the fact that Bob—for all he goes through—comes away with little in the way of moral insight ("It's this f---ing life," he says in his valedictory voice-over speech...

...Cute, no...

...And what happened next, when he shot up, was invariably glorious: "Everything took on the rosy hue of unlimited success...

...and he's so superstitious (it's implied) because he was brought up a pious Catholic...

...perhaps it's James Fogle, the Washington'State jailbird from whose unpublished, largely autobiographical novel this picture was adapted...

...at Bob's perverse superstitiousness...

...For up till Nadine's death the movie has a certain gritty, disturbing power...

...Whether the attraction is sexual, or whether Gentry—the very embodiment of law and order—envies Bob's rebelliousness, remains ambiguous...

...And that's a big problem with Drugstore Cowboy: Bob is completely, undividedly, and utterly unsympathetic...

...Nor do we have any sense of what drove him to drugs in the first place, aside from the aforementioned fact that they made life beautiful...

...Suddenly Bob does an about-face: he wants to stop doing drugs...

...Beat-style sentimentality...

...Nor does his explanation help matters much: as he tells Dianne, he was so freaked out by Nadine's death that he vowed he'd kick the habit if only God or the Devil or Whoever Was Up There helped him get safely through the ordeal of disposing of her body...

...But it just didn't work out...

...All you have to do is read the labels on the little bottles...

...Nor do the filmmakers seem to have a clear idea what they're doing in- this latter part of the film...

...though director Gus Van Sant and his co-writer Dan Yost hardly overload the film.with plot, they know something about dramatic shape and pacing, and they're gifted with a genuine—if aberrant—wit...

...He's arguably themost despicable creature in the history of American letters (if you don't know why, next time you're in a bookstore grab Ted Morgan's 1988 biography of him, Literary Outlaw, and open it to any page), and the filmmakers obviously expect us to recognize him and to identify him with his character...

...It's 1971, and these four adorable kids live together in Portland, Oregon, where—since none of them holds down a job—they spend their days jabbing hypodermic needles into their arms and ripping off local pharmacies...

...aside from his superstition, his encyclopedic knowledge of narcotics, and his apparent indifference to sex (quoth Dianne: "Bob's just like a rabbit: in and out, and no nonsense—and that goes for a lot more than a hospital pharmacy"), there isn't much of a character here...

...This film would've been a lot more respectable a work c) realism if Van Sant had dared to pm people in the title roles who looked like 26-year-old drug addicts...

...Sometimes you do find yourself laughing—and sometimes you find yourself a bit stunned at everyone else's amusement...

...Yet, for all its toughness, the film is not free of...

...The moral bankruptcy of the film is underlined by the presence in the later Portland sequences of the elderly Beat novelist William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch, Junky...

...The characters feel real, the action darkly compelling...

...Van Sant's scattershot japery makes him seem a veritable accomplice in his characters' anarchic malfeasance...

...at the sight of that undercover cop being shot by that rifle-toting neighbor...

...at the way Bob's runaway dog (in one of several brief, goofy, extraneous flashbacks) leads the police to his door after a crime...

...nor does he quit because he wants to do himself a favor...

...But this just doesn't work dramatically, for neither Bob's immoderate superstition nor his Catholicism is ever made to seem a truly integral part of his character...

...and Rick drives the getaway car...

...from the moment that it's introduced, the superstition comes off as a feeble joke on the part of the filmmakers, a wacky quirk of character that doesn't quite click into place, while the Catholicism is barely established at all...

...I don't mean to suggest that the film doesn't have some noteworthy assets...

...Le Gross likewise rings true as the dense and tractable Rick...

...you never know what's going to happen next"), and about the irony that Bob's final downfall...

...One laughs not because the filmmakers have humorously illuminated some aspect of the movie's theme or of its protagonists, but because they've interjected a piece of action or a line of dialogue so extreme in its stupidity, its evil, or its ludicrousness that it serves to remind one—to one's great relief—either that (a) this is just a movie, and not reality, or (b) that these characters are so inane and despicable that their fate is not worth getting anxious about...