If you like seeing Aaron Paul make sad puppy addict eyes and need your fix until the return of Breaking Bad; still haven’t gotten your heart back from Mary Elizabeth Winstead after seeing Scott Pilgrim vs. The World; wish The Help would mainly serve to get Octavia Spencer better parts; or wonder what it would be like to hear Ron Swanson talk dirty to one of the Tammys, Smashed may be the movie for you. This slight addiction drama, which I saw at Sundance, feels unfortunately abbreviated, but it’s anchored by one hell of a performance by Winstead. And it’s honest and explicitly ugly about addiction without being grotesque, striking a difficult and effective balance.

I imagine it’s not news to any of you that the dude who portrays Jesse Pinkman can play an addict. But as Charlie, half of a married couple, both of whom are drunks, Paul tones thing down a bit. His alcoholism means he’s reckless—he’ll ride a bike drunk—and that his relationship to the universe is often blurred and softened. When he wakes up to find that his wife Kate has wet the bed in an alcoholic stupor, he jokes that his real job is to change their sheets. But Charlie is a music blogger, and apparently successful and functional enough in that occupation (plus, his parents helped buy the house he and Kate live in) that his drinking is never going to force a crisis.

That is not the case for Kate, whose alcoholism appears to be somewhat more severe than Charlie’s. She doesn’t just work outside of their house—she teaches elementary school, an environment that’s not particularly friendly to people with hangovers so bad they throw up in class. To avoid confessing that she’s a drunk, Kate lets her class and her coworkers think she’s pregnant, an impression that’s particularly dangerous giving that her principal (Megan Mullally) has never been able to conceive, and gets overinvested in the idea of Kate having a child.

As Kate stumbles towards recovery, stops drinking, and relapses, Winstead gives a remarkably un-vain performance. Bottom for her turns out to be not just the night she drunkenly decides to take a hit of crack and wakes up under a bridge, but relieving herself on the floor of a liquor store that refuses to sell her more wine. And the movie is blunt about exploring the link between Kate’s drinking and her sexual aggressiveness. In one disturbing scene, when Charlie falls asleep while he and Kate are having sex, she hits him while trying to keep him awake, and then continues to have even when he can’t be roused. When Kate relapses, she pushes herself on Charlie even when he’s trying both to get her to stop drinking and rejecting her advances. Stories about women assaulting men tend to be treated as if they’re non-existent or limited to police procedurals, and I appreciate that Smashed has the integrity to treat Kate’s behavior for the disturbing boundary-crossing that it is. Kate may not be a feminist ideal, but presenting her actions with honesty and nuance means the movie is a refreshing break with gender types in these sorts of stories.

I wish the movie had spent a bit more time showing Kate digging her way out of the enormous hole she’s dug for herself. We get to meet Jenny (Octavia Spencer), her sponsor, who tells us that “All I knew about taking care of myself was fucking people over…Maybe I’ve have replaced alcohol with chocolate chip cookies and nacho cheese…From now on I will enjoy my donuts. but I prefer them to hangovers” but it would be nice to see more of her life beyond her role as a mentor to Kate. And while I appreciate James Ponsoldt’s decision not show Kate in the cliche throes of detox, the movie could have spent more time watching her rebuild a sober life. Drinking isn’t like a breakup: leaving alcohol behind has required Kate to rebuild her entire life, and I’d have been curious to see more of her path to professional, emotional, and sexual health.

If I was in possession of a large amount of extremely valuable and beautiful beachfront Hawaiian land that I wasn’t allowed to continue owning, and if I cared about my family’s legacy and the future of my state, I would have a number of options. I could sell it. I could work with the National Parks Service to set up the first National Seashore in Hawaii. I could collaborate with the Hawaii State Parks agency to preserve the land and make it accessible to people other than my family. I could spin it off into an independent charity. I could donate it into a university. I could sell some of it and purchase a small piece of it at market price to preserve as a family compound. Matt King, the wealthy lawyer portrayed by George Clooney in Alexander Payne’s smug The Descendants, considers only that first option. It’s a movie that ultimately argues that the highest moral cause is a rich man keeping what’s his. And that’s not the only thing that I disliked about the second painfully politically-misguided (and oddly out of touch) movie George Clooney gave us in 2011.

That conviction that Matt’s only options are turning the land into money or keeping it for himself doesn’t just give us a narrator who is painfully self-absorbed. It’s of a piece with the movie’s odd tendency to treat the land deal part of the plot as if it’s hugely momentous and then to dissipate all the tension surrounding it. There’s essentially no debate about what to do with the land because the positions of the family members who don’t want to sell are never articulated: it’s just asserted that there are people out there who would prefer to hold on to the land even though the law says they can’t. The closest thing there is to an argument is about whether to sell to a local developer or one based out of another state. We know that Matt thinks some of his relatives are shiftless spendthrifts who would prefer to take a higher price from the non-local developer, but no one on the other side talks about what it means to them to support the Hawaiian economy, or what, if any, responsibilities they feel they have to their state. They’re just bodies there to indicate that there are substantial votes on each side. And ultimately, the big decision we’ve been told has to be made at this family gathering is actually seven years away from its deadline and pushed aside until King can find another solution.

The same shallow approach applies to every other discussion of Hawaii’s economics in the movie. The Descendants deserves credit for getting lots of non-white people into the camera frame, often on planes next to Matt King’s head as he jumps from island to island. But the movie focuses most directly on native Hawaiians during Matt’s opening monologue, as illustrations of troubles in the paradise that he declares “can go fuck itself.” The vacant, the indigent? These are things that Matt King has to endure, along with his wife’s coma. If what makes one Hawaiian is a fondness for comfortable clothing and a sense of noblesse oblige without the oblige, there are regional and ethnic identities I’d be more interested in spending time exploring.
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One of the things about living on a frontier is that everyone’s hustling to survive and there isn’t an enormous amount of time for everyone to sit around the Gem and talk about their feelings, even if the Gem was the kind of establishment where you felt inclined to be vulnerable in more than the conventional ways. But it’s extremely satisfying in this pair of episodes to watch three characters snap themselves out of bad circumstances.

First is A.W. Merrick, who has had his presses wrecked and his hopes for a romance with the new schoolmarm dashed after running afoul of Commissioner Jarry and the Hearst interests. Al comes to pay a visit through a connecting door he was previously unaware of, though as A.W. explains “Several of your patrons in different stages of undress have illuminated me” of its existence. “I’m in despair,” A.W. explains to his neighbor. “The physical damage may be repairable, but the psychic wound may be permanent.” But Al gives him a smack and some good advice: “The world ends when you’re dead. Until then, you’ve got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man and give some back.” A show like The Wire might have deepened the despair, but Deadwood believes that there’s still goodness in the world. When A.W. exerts himself, befriending his new office-mate, the Russian telegraph operator, they’re rewarded with one of the most joyful scenes of the recent golden age of television, Tom Nuttall’s bicycle ride:

Then there’s Jane, who is in a dangerously bad way, telling Charlie, who finds her with bloodied lips, that “I woke up on the dirt in the fucking graveyard, questioning dusk or dawn.” Charlie tries to bring her back to herself by finding a way for her to do for others since she won’t do for herself, suggesting she visit the bereaved Joanie Stubbs because “Seeing as you know about losing friends, you might be a good person to go on and talk to her,” but he tells Bill’s grave that he doesn’t have much confidence in her recovery. Still, when Jane bestirs herself to visit Joanie’s mausoleum of a whorehouse, there does seem to be a spark. When Joanie offers Jane a drink, Jane initially explains that “Yes, but my opening position is no,” before explaining that her preference in booze is “That it ain’t been previously swallowed. Bourbon, if you got it.” And if Joanie gets Jane wanting to drink in a moderate way, Jane gets Joanie talking about the terrible fate that’s befallen her.

Joanie’s been the most beaten-down character in the show practically since its beginning. So there’s something particularly powerful about seeing her bestir herself for the first time since the murders. Cy can’t figure out that Joanie is looking for new patterns, asking her, “What the fuck did you come here for if not to be protected?” And when Joanie smashes her bourbon bottle against Wolcott’s head and tells him to get out of establishment or she’ll kill him, I actually cheered. Maybe Joanie wouldn’t have been able to ward off Wolcott if Charlie Utter hadn’t softened him up for her, but I’m so glad that she saves herself. I understand why Alma’s dithering about Ellsworth’s (totally adorable, btw) proposal; I understand why Martha speaks to Seth in code. But in the case of these terrible murders, backed by powerful institutions, it’s wonderful to see Joanie get her own justice when the law can’t, or won’t, protect her.

Due both to the news that The Thin Man is headed for a remake, the failed remake of Arthur, and the fact that Netflix Instant is letting me make up for lost time and a childhood mostly without a television by giving me access to all of Cheers, I’ve been thinking a lot about alcohol and popular culture. Obviously, both Arthur and the Thin Man movies were built around fairly constant levels of alcohol consumption and a fairly unrepentant attitude towards that, which poses a real challenge to remaking them given how much attitudes about alcohol use and abuse have shifted since the originals were made. By contrast, Sam’s alcoholism is a constant if mostly unobtrusive undercurrent in the early seasons of Cheers.

I’m hard-pressed to think of a contemporary pop culture phenomenon that presents addiction in such a matter-of-fact way, as part of someone’s larger life, rather than the defining feature in it. We’ve got a lot of movies about the process of recovery, which makes sense, given the way we’ve made a cultural fetish of rehabilitation. And we have a lot of culture about the tragedy of addiction, whether it’s Nic Cage drinking himself to death in Vegas (life lesson: if that’s the only movie you have available to you at a slumber party, go with the board games), or the baroqueness of addiction, like in Bad Santa. But we don’t have a lot of shows or movies about the normalcy of addiction—I’d be curious as to how the Anonymous bit of A.A. plays into that—and the maintenance work of recovery, which is what most people who don’t fly off to lux treatment centers need to do. It’s an extraordinarily individual response to a condition with considerable societal costs. The universe, or rather, Funny or Die, appears to have answered my plea in the form of a short movie, Successful Alcoholics:

The final scene in particular is a great explication of the challenges of staying sober—or for that matter, walking away from the highs of manic depression in favor of a blander equilibrium. And it’s further proof that Lizzy Caplan is a marvelous actress. I’d love to see a feature-length version of this, with her starring in it.

Edit: It’s come to my attention that I didn’t do a great job of defining exactly what I’m looking for. As I said in comments, I’d like to see something that a) is in a contemporary setting, that b) isn’t specifically about addiction/the drug trade/in some other way an “issue” show or movie, where c) the character’s addiction is a day-to-day factor the way it is in Cheers, rather than relapse thrusting the issue to the fore only to have it not be talked about much otherwise. And I’d be curious to see this happen on a huge hit. Captain Cragen on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit is a good example of this. But on a show like Bones, for example, where almost every episode ends in a bar, it would be interesting to see a character who goes along but doesn’t drink because he or she can’t. It’s always annoyed me how Booth’s gambling equation is generally only brought out for Very Special Episodes.