Culture Blues

The Instant Movie Club: White Irish Drinkers

Every week, your friends at Culture Blues get together to watch a movie from their Netflix Instant queue. Then, they discuss their thoughts over a meal that is way too hot to eat – geez intern, what did you do? Cook this with a flamethrower? Har har har. This is The Instant Movie Club.

This week we’re checking out White Irish Drinkers, an indie family drama set in 70s Brooklyn, focusing on a pair of brothers trying to escape their drunkard father and doomed lifestyle.

Next Week: Panic - William H. Macy stars alongside Donald Sutherland and John Ritter in TV vet Henry Bromell's critically acclaimed hitman-in-crisis film.

SPOILERS BELOW!

Jeremiah White:  When I glanced at writer/director John Gray’s IMDB page after watching White Irish Drinkers, and discovered that he is a veteran writer and director of TV movies and shows like The Ghost Whisperer, things suddenly made more sense. The clichés, heavy-handed dialogue and all-around artificial nature made WID feel like a network’s attempt at a series about a “complicated” family in the 70s.

One of the best things to come out of WID is that it makes me that much more appreciative of good period films. The movies that make you feel like you are actually witnessing a different time and place. The 70s identifiers are all over the place here, but it just never feels right. The set design, wardrobe and dialogue always seem a little bit off. And the “how are you going to make a living working with computers?” jokes are particularly lame examples of a largely meritless species.

The crudely constructed world is populated with by-the-numbers characters. Nick Thurston’s smart and sensitive Brian is sympathetic and likable enough but his brother Danny, played by Geoffrey Wigdor, is like Paul Rudd as a caricature of a small time 70s crook. I had high hopes for Stephen Lang as their drunken, abusive father and his first scene indicated a more dynamic character than the usual grumbling grump. When he delivered that old Irish joke, I figured this is a man who wouldn’t be happy with his family cowering in fear all the time. Lang then spends the next 100 minutes playing exactly the kind of one-dimensional bully that I’d hoped they would avoid. These performances all have shining moments (well, Thurston and Lang for sure), but these moments are brief and rare and add up to very little.

White Irish Drinkers largely plays it too safe to be truly painful, but it’s so fake (can you remember a more forced bit of family bonding than joking about how hot the mom’s food is?) and clunky (Lang literally walks into and out of a scene just to deliver his big, manipulative and ineffective dementia-induced speech showing that he really is, or was, a caring father) that by the time the final act turned into an endless string of on-the-nose heart-to-hearts, I wanted to get out of my living room just as bad as the Brian wanted to get out of Brooklyn.

Got drunk and hallucinated a crappy show about dinosaurs.

Jeff Hart:  Jeremiah pretty much nailed it. White Irish Drinkers is a total misfire – a hokey and predictable script, mawkish performances, and an absolute failure to create any kind of period atmosphere. The film is so cookie cutter and formulaic that it got me thinking about genre films, so I’m going to go ahead and totally derail this discussion.

While family dramas like White Irish Drinkers are definitely a genre of film, we don’t normally consider them genre films. Normally, genre films are things like action and horror, where the scripts are predictable, the performances poor, and the atmosphere nonexistent. Of course, a solid action or horror movie can transcend the genre label by excelling in any of those areas. Or, a genre film can be a total piece of shit, but be good at delivering the beats we expect from it, and thus succeed.

For instance, what do we expect from a good action movie? A badass hero, a love-to-hate villain, and at least a couple eye-popping combat sequences. Forget all the failings of script, direction, acting – all the fundamentals of filmmaking – if you can deliver those base action requirements, a fan of the genre will leave happy.

So what if family dramas were considered genre films, possessed of a dedicated fan base that get their kicks watching emotionally wounded underdogs push against their familial boundaries? What would we expect them to deliver? A sympathetic but troubled main character with a skill that makes him special (the Will Hunting special), at least one big speech that could be played at the Oscars during the Best Supporting Actor clip package, and at least one moment to squeeze out a good cry. (“Eh, the movie was alright, just a generic family drama, but some of the speeches were AMAZING and I totally got to cry!”)

Boiled down to genre elements, does White Irish Drinkers manage to succeed? Thurston is a likable lead with plenty of emotional baggage, who happens to be preternaturally skilled at creating accurate sketches on frozen bar windows. So far so good. White Irish Drinkers has big speeches in spades – Jeremiah already mentioned Lang’s rambling “good daddy” speech, but there’s big ACTING moments from the older brother as well. And, the entire last act is just one watery eyeball stacked on top of the next, particularly when Thurston literally screams to the heavens over his brother’s dead body. Grab your tissue box, dramaheads!

As a genre film, White Irish Drinkers is a success. If we only boiled all films down to their most primitive elements - like we do with action movies, or horror, or even pornography – White Irish Drinkers might actually be worth watching. Fortunately, we don’t, and it isn’t.