Days of Wine and Roses.

So this was an interesting one.

When I saw the cover of the DVD and saw Jack Lemmon on it, I was excepting a romantic comedy, my thoughts that it was a rom com got stronger when I saw that Blake Edwards was the director. Now I’m excepting some screw ball and some sight gags.
But what I got!? Wow! It’s a very dark comedy about alcoholism . It hits you too. It’s not an exaggeration of the problem for cinematic purposes but shows you how emotionally dark the problem can get.
I like the set up. Jack Lemmon plays an ad exec who likes to drink, but it did not seem like a problem until he found a drinking buddy in his romantic interest. She did not drink when she first met him but it was one of those things that they did together. They supported each other’s habits. Whenever something would go wrong in Joe’s life his wife scrub it off as not being his fault but the fault of the world and that it was all politics. The drinking was so subtle I did not even notice the movie was about drinking. Then Joe realized he had a problem they tried to beat it by  themselves but that did not work. So that’s when Joe went to AA and we got the early process of the program.
Interesting part of this part of the film is that the dude who played Oscar Madison on the TV show the Odd Couple plays Joe’s AA sponsor (Jack Lemmon famously played Felix Ungar in the move version of the Odd Couple).
An unexpected drama reminds me of the Man with the Golden Arm with Frank Sinatra, which is about drug addiction and coming to terms with that.

Nothing like a little surprise in a movie. I was expecting a light comedy, but got a really good dark one.