Hollywood Goes on the Wagon

By RICHARD CORLISS

Pretty pathetic creature. He hides out at the local bar and tries to forget his troubles by downing shot after shot of whiskey. When he finally seeks help for his woes, it is not A.A. he calls but another broken soul who has sipped himself into a perpetual stupor. So what do you think? Is Roger Rabbit an alcoholic?

Bud Yorkin thinks so. And, as director of this summer's flop Arthur 2 on the Rocks, he should know. Yorkin is steamed at critics who torpedoed his movie for its portrait of an insouciant inebriate. "Arthur is a fantasy , character," he spumes, "just like Roger Rabbit. But that movie is all about drinking, and it's being called one of the great movies of all time."

Yorkin may be ignoring a few variables: that sequels often fall on their prats, that Stars Dudley Moore and Liza Minnelli have been on a 0-for-ever streak since the original Arthur in 1981, that critics didn't make Who Framed Roger Rabbit a hit, and they didn't break Arthur 2. Still, Yorkin deserves sympathy for getting caught in a zeitgeist warp. Seven years ago, at the dawn of the Reagan era, a movie drunk could seem a sweet anachronism, a throwback to giddier times with fewer responsibilities. Today Americans know there is a price to be paid for every excess, fiscal or physical. And in a town where, as one wag notes, "there are more stars at a Rodeo Drive Alcoholics Anonymous meeting than there are at the Academy Awards," a few moviemakers are taking the pledge to put drug and alcohol addiction onscreen.

Two biographical films, soon to be released, will limn the twin toxicities of heroin and pop celebrity. Bird is Clint Eastwood's meditation on the pioneering jazzman junkie Charlie Parker; Wired adapts Bob Woodward's book about the life and drug-induced death of John Belushi. Both movies fit a familiar genre: a star is born, a star falls into the black hole of self- abuse, a star dies. But a third drug-and-alcohol drama, Clean and Sober, which opened last week to generous reviews, goes for the grit without the name- dropping glamour. It has eyes to be the Lost Weekend, the Days of Wine and Roses of the late '80s.

Michael Keaton plays Daryl Poynter, the very model of a white-collar slime mold: he's a thief, an accessory to murder and a meanie to his mom. He can't even admit he has a drug problem -- cocaine and alcohol -- until a tough-love therapist (Morgan Freeman), an A.A. veteran (M. Emmet Walsh) and a nervy fellow addict (Kathy Baker) help him see the dark before the light. Some of the early scenes ring as inauthentic as the Philadelphia accents; each supporting junkie pushes too hard, as if he were part of an Actors Lab experiment that failed. But there are home truths here. Mostly, the film shows, not preaches. And Keaton proves how fully a fine comic actor can inhabit a serious, potentially solemn film.

Does this trio of films signal a new wave or just a coincidence? That is hard to say, since pictures that glorify the communal joys of tippling can still magnetize moviegoers; Cocktail, starring Tom Cruise as a bartender who becomes famous for 15 martinis, earned $27 million in its first ten days of release. And any serious film has a handicap. When Bright Lights, Big City sent Michael J. Fox to the lower-middle depths of coke craving, audiences sniffed and stayed away. "Will people go to Clean and Sober?" wonders its co-producer Tony Ganz. "If they have a problem with alcoholism, they may refuse to go. If they don't have a problem, they may not want to go." Yet it is good to see Hollywood emerging from its binge of party-till-you-puke teen comedies and issuing the warning "Substance abuse may be hazardous to your health."

It used to be that movie screeds about drinking and drugs were hazardous only at the box office. As Wired Co-Producer Ed Feldman notes, "You can't do an hour-and-45-minute sermon." TV movies, with their captive middle-aged audiences and their social diseases of the week, were the place for tidy moralizing. But traditionally, the big screen and its youthful audience welcomed the happy drunk. For early moviegoers, booze was a truth serum that liberated every endearing character from Charlie Chaplin to Dumbo. It can still cadge cheap laughs: in this summer's License to Drive, a teenager's dream girl does a drunken dance on his dad's car hood. For the '60s generation, the use of recreational drugs was a gesture of political defiance, and movies mimicked it. "Drugs weren't a by-product of our culture," says Glenn Gordon Caron, 34, the Moonlighting mogul who directed Clean and Sober. "They were our culture."

In the overdue national detox program that may be the '90s, the drug culture could change. On movie screens it already has. Film Critic Roger Ebert, who has ragged Hollywood for glamourizing alcoholics, is hopeful: "Today you have creative people finding solutions." Clean and Sober will give an early clue to that solution. Will American moviegoers find the tonic chill of a dramatized A.A. lecture as bracing as the sight of a rabbit who can act like a boozehound? Stay tuned.

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles