It’s all fun and games until someone ends up smoking crack. This is the life of Kate (played with equal parts grace, poise and intelligence by Mary Elizabeth Winstead) in Smashed. She wears perfectly kindergarten-teacher-sneakers with a floral dress that dangles loosely on her thin frame. There is a lot of sadness in Kate’s eyes as she tries to steal wine, pees on a convenience store floor and bikes around plastered with her husband Charlie (Aaron Paul, who appears to have stepped right off the set of Breaking Bad). It’s a whimsical, romantic young elopement that is entrenched in years of alcohol-stained sadness.
But Smashed is far from a sob story. “People felt like they needed permission to laugh,” writer/director James Ponsoldt recently told me. He himself is a jovial, bearded guy who has seen what horrors alcohol and various addictions can wreak upon people. But the reason why the film feels relatable is that there is no overt sympathy forced upon Kate. We see it in the rings enshrouding her eyes, the strained relationship she has with Charlie and his brother, the lies she tells at work. One morning, Kate upchucks in front of her kindergarten class prompting them to question her wellbeing. In a brilliantly fatal move, she lies and says she is pregnant, causing Principal Barnes (Megan Mullally of Will & Grace) to launch into an irrepressible whirl of excitement. An amazingly awkward and hilarious baby shower scene follows.
It’s these moments where Smashed lifts the weight and difficulty of addiction on the back of humor that makes it really poignant and truthful. Proximity to the issue most certainly helped the writing process, taking fully realized emotions and experiences and channeling them through Kate. Co-writer Susan Burke was attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings during the film’s production, a lot of which Mary Elizabeth Winstead joined. “I related a lot to the people in the rooms and the stories they were telling,” Winstead said in our recent interview. The exposure to these actual happenings definitely paid off in the final product. When Kate introduces herself at her first AA meeting, it doesn’t feel grandiose or epic like it often does in other films about rehabilitation. It’s rather awkward and almost humorously ridiculous to say the words “I’m an alcoholic,” aloud. Kate grapples with the fixedness of that statement, as any 20-something would likely do.
“It’s such a blurry line between what’s being young and normal and what’s unhealthy and scary,” Winstead adeptly said of Kate’s situation. It is a conundrum that extends far beyond the length of the screen. The only clear divisive line between a drinking habit and a drinking problem is rehabilitation.
While most of the attention surrounding Smashed is (rightfully) being directed towards Winstead, Nick Offerman of Parks and Recreation provides a lot of the comedic lift in the movie, as well as toying with how uncomfortable the word “moist” makes people feel. Mr. Davies is damaged too, a fellow teacher at Kate’s school he reveals to her that he is nine years sober from, amongst many things, cocaine. The impetus for getting her to try AA, Mr. Davies serves as a de facto mentor. Octavia Spencer (gaining all the more warranted notoriety after The Help) plays Kate’s AA sponsor Jenny. Kate asks Jenny for her sponsorship in the meek way in which a seventh-grade boy would ask someone on his first date. It’s a touching, humanizing scene and Spencer fills the character with warmth.
In Smashed, we watch someone undergo rehab, serious life adjustments that are chronicled in daily reality television. But it’s a story about commitment and what it means for young people to choose something that will have ramifications for the rest of their lives. There is something inherently vital and scary about taking control, but it’s a necessary challenge with which to contend. “To commit to anything at that age is really hard,” Ponsoldt spoke of the movie and life. And there’s no emerging from it unscathed.