The Days of Wine and Roses

I can only guess how audiences who were accustomed to Jack Lemmon in comedies reacted to his performance in The Days Of Wine and Roses. What I do know is that there were moments watching it where I was in this queasy space between wanting to laugh at some of his antics as a drunk and feeling sick at his character's rapid descent into degradation. For this reason, Blake Edwards was exactly right in casting him. An actor better known for serious work might have taken the role so far into pathos that I would have judged his character instead of being invited to share in the humor that Joe Clay (often wrongly) sees in his own drunkenness. Lemmon's performance took me from a kind of guilty laughter to crushing pain sometimes within a ten second period. Lee Remick, whose character starts as Joe Clay's teetotaling wife and ends up sinking even lower than Clay does, is equally effective. The more I see of her work in the late 50s and early 60s, the more I wish I could see.

The movie isn't one for lovers of linear plots. The Days of Wine and Roses meanders from moment to moment, observing Joe and Kirsten's fall in to alcoholism without forcing them to jump through the hoops of a conventional story. Sometimes this hurts the film. I wasn't clear on just how many jobs Joe had been fired from until he mentioned it in an argument with Kirsten, but now that I think of it, maybe this isn't a flaw. Maybe in some ways the meandering and fogginess about specific plot events is meant, like Lemmon's performance, to put me in the head of a drunk.

It's a good movie. See it.