Meg Ryan, boozer? This we had to see. Nominated for inclusion on our distilled list of potent Barfly Flicks List, my wife and I recently subjected ourselves to Meg Ryan's hilarious romantic comedy from the last century, 1994's squirm-worthy When a Man Loves a Woman.
What? It's not a comedy? Co-authored by Al Franken? Well, it got a few chuckles hereabouts. We would have called it merely a failed comedy for underperforming on the laugh-meter, but it looks like it was intended to be a failed drama all along. Mercy.
Poor Andy Garcia. At least his character recognizes he's being blamed for someone else's problem. All he does is work his butt off at a crappy job that keeps him away from home a lot (airline pilot.) He and his wife live in a beautiful home, with gravid, ethnic hired help. He provides as much love and support as can be expected, and what does he get for it? You're too good.
Dependable, loving husbands out there - you can't win.
So Meg goes into detox where she's exposed to an even more toxic activity: support groups. This is where she learns deadly phrases like "feelings about your feelings." The horror.
You could look at it one way; there is a kind of person who needs this emotional navel-gazing. They deserve our sympathy and understanding. Why, it's kind of like alcohol then, isn't it? It's a habit like any other. You use it as a tool to feel good about yourself, whether you deserve it or not. So, in this film, alcohol is merely what Meg's character uses to qualify for group therapy, scenes of which, in this movie, likely has more of that than any other on record.
In one particularly heavy-handed episode during Andy's visit to the detox emporium, and after hearing Meg say how much she admires these people, he's subjected to an impromptu group session with them. In a lounge with a crowd of such males watching a ballgame, he's almost immediately, with no dramatic build-up at all, hammered by the assembled doomed substance slaves, apparently for looking down on them.
They can tell, you see, just by the look on his face. As he states a couple of times in the movie, "Hey, this is my face."
One jerk of an unrecoverable lush — and we suspect the film's casting folks probably got a real alky for the part; apologies, but don't blame us for these cast-the-afflicted stunts — jumps to the conclusion that Andy is more used to watching ballgames with a beer in hand. Andy delicately refutes that.
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