The American way, the Hollywood way, the TV-movie-of-the-week way, to do a Problem Picture: if we are going to take on alcoholism, we are going to take it on to the exclusion of all else. It has got to be front and center and solo. The chief difference between the big-screen way and the little-screen way is that the first way will include a number of pop-song montages, and the second way will instead include commercials. Co-written and co-executive-produced by comedian Al Franken, the movie is the flip side -- the sincere side, that would be -- of his persona as the self-esteem guru, Stuart Smalley, on Saturday Night Live. Like Smalley, Franken has total faith in the efficacy of talking a problem out. And talking and talking and talking and talking and talking. One acceptable alcoholic anecdote is added to the Everest-sized pile of them: the middle-of-the-night trip to the curbside garbage can to dispose of the incriminating bottle, the last fortifying swig from it, and the locked front door on the return trip to bed. Elsewhere, however, the vignette of the wise-sad-adorable little girl clutching her dolly and watching Mommy in the closet with the upturned bottle is dramatization on the level of a thirty-second TV spot (dial 1-800-GET-HELP). More often, the scenes unfold like re-enactments of the Representative Examples from a self-help bestseller: Women Who Drink Too Much, maybe. Meg Ryan, Andy Garcia, Lauren Tom, Ellen Burstyn; directed by Luis Mandoki. (1994) — Duncan Shepherd
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