After mostly sitcom shtick at the multiplex during the 1980s (including brilliant turns in the likes of Night Shift and Beetlejuice), Michael Keaton displayed his dramatic chops with 1988’s Clean and Sober. As Daryl Poynter, a commercial realtor who reluctantly checks himself into rehab after a woman overdoses in his apartment, Keaton sets his comic instincts aside and lets his wit and energy sour into something mean-spirited. You still see his mind racing, but nefariously so, as Daryl squirms his way through strings of lies. And when those falsehoods fail, he gives in to full-on rage, as when he belittles his rehab counselor (Morgan Freeman) over his paltry salary. Freeman is wonderful, of course—impervious and imperious—while M. Emmet Walsh, so unnerving a few years earlier in the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple, has a handful of moving monologues as Daryl’s eventual sponsor. Also quite good as a fellow patient is Kathy Baker—she’s vibrant, even under chemical duress—though the movie gets a bit off track in its final third when it follows them into an unwise romance. The middle section, set in the rehab facility, is the movie’s strongest, given enough visual interest thanks to thoughtful blocking on the part of director Glenn Gordon Caron (including a moment with Keaton and Freeman playing power games while standing at urinals). As a vehicle for Keaton, Clean and Sober certainly showed his range, perhaps never more so than during a solo scene in which Daryl makes a desperate, late-night call to his mother asking for money. At once cocky and simpering, he grits his teeth pretending to be a “successful son”—an act neither of them believes.
(9/9/2024)
