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When Love Is Not Enough: The Lois Wilson Story (2010)
A movie not only about alcoholism, but codependency
When Love Is Not Enough: The Lois Wilson Story is a somewhat-fictionalized Hallmark movie about the life and travails of Bill W., co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, and particularly of his wife Lois, founder of Al-Anon.
The movie covers the time period from their wedding in 1918 until roughly the 1950s. Even early on, there's a pattern of Lois "propping up" Bill, supporting him financially when he struggles to find a career, then convincing a friend to hire him at his financial firm. Bill is a roaring success at finance, but it's stressful work, and he starts to blow off steam with frequent drunken nights out with friends. This soon gives way to drinking at the office, and with the market crash of 1929 Bill finds himself suddenly unemployed and nose-diving into chronic alcoholism, while Lois scrambles to keep them afloat. Over the next several years, the couple struggle with Bill's drinking as well as poverty, health issues, and social isolation until Bill finally stumbles across Dr. Bob Smith, with whom he co-founded AA and found lasting sobriety.
The movie does a good job of portraying the nightmarish isolation of alcoholism, for both Bill and Lois. AA has become increasingly controversial in recent years, but really was a game-changer when it came about. As Lois herself pointed out, the only real option for "drunks" before then was the mental asylum - a possibility Bill is threatened with when he's at his lowest.
However, as Lois herself alludes at one point, we're supposed to be talking about her now. As little as alcoholism was understood, associated concepts such as "codependency" and "enabling" were even less understood. Lois' behaviour is never referred to as such in this movie, but it's still demonstrated in spades. This is what I truly appreciate about this movie - it isn't another tired "troubled man saved by a good woman" story - the point is that Lois can't save Bill no matter what she does, and he has to find his own path.
Lois stands by her man, and rather than heroic loyalty, it's portrayed as mutually-assured destruction. At a time when divorce was still rare and somewhat scandalous, Lois' friends and family implore her to leave, only to do so themselves when they can no longer stand to watch. Over the years, Lois loses her financial security, her home, her most treasured possessions, most of her family and friends, her physical and mental health, and her ability to have or adopt children. And for all that, it's not a coincidence that the key moments leading to Bill's sobriety happen when she's not around to smooth his path.
Lois, to her own surprise, is angry and distraught at Bill's recovery (another facet of codependency - she admits that she had wanted to be the one to "save" him, and she doesn't quite know what to do with herself when he no longer needs so much caretaking). During one of his AA meetings, she steps outside to find the wife of one of the attendees sitting in a car - and then realizes the entire street is lined with wives in cars, not trusting their husbands to drive themselves to and from Bill's meetings. Inviting the women in for tea, their commiserations over their husbands' drinking leads to the founding of a second group, Al-Anon, supporting the loved ones of alcoholics. It is here that Lois begins to understand her own "illness" and how quite contrary to "saving" Bill, she'd been making things worse.
With this, the fact that the movie ends with Lois first quietly turning a conversation back to herself when Bill begins to shift the topic to his feelings, then with them having an actual fight, is actually quite optimistic. It's the full circle not only of Bill's recovery, but also of Lois', as she finally learns to stop revolving around Bill's needs and assert her own, even forcefully if necessary.
Of course the movie has its drawbacks too, as others have mentioned - certain details have been omitted (particularly Bill's rumoured lecherous nature in addition to his drinking - poor Lois!), and Hallmark movies always tend towards the saccharine and the melodramatic. The real people and real events were of course more complex than what the movie portrayed. That said, overall I quite liked this movie, and I felt it did a good job of hitting all the emotional notes it needed to for a satisfying story.
Do Começo ao Fim (2009)
Interesting Concept, Odd Execution
(Okay, this got LENGTHY, but I was a bit frustrated trying to find a thorough synopsis of this movie in English, so hopefully this will potentially be helpful to others who want to get the entire run-down before diving in.)
This movie is about two Brazilian half-brothers who begin an incestuous relationship as adults. To start with, I found I needed to accept the premise that this movie is set a step or two away from our reality, in an alternate one where, to start with, soulmates are definitely real. Thomàs, the youngest child, does not open his eyes for the first several weeks of his life until shown to his five-year-old half-brother Francisco, at which point he looks directly into his brother's eyes. Throughout the movie, there are implications that there is something mystical or pre-ordained about the brothers' connection to one another. Thomàs literally only has eyes for his brother practically from the moment of his birth.
Upon Thomàs' dramatic eye-opening, the movie jumps ahead to when the boys are about 6 and 11 years old, living in a happy, loving home with mother Julieta, Thomàs' father Alexandre, and Rosa, the nanny and family friend. This is my favourite segment of the movie, as the audience's understanding of the brothers' relationship is built up gradually - first as very ordinary brothers who play and bicker, then as close and affectionate brothers, then as something... a little too insular and excessive. The affection between them is childish and innocent, but also seemingly constant. They appear to spend their days playing and petting and kissing one another, and fall asleep wrapped around each other at night. A school fight (and lack of other children around them in general) suggests that the brothers have no other friends and keep to themselves. Francisco, already bordering on Nearly Too Old For All This, grows possessive of Thomàs. No individual thing is inappropriate, but there is a Too Much-ness to it that starts to concern their parents. However, the parents appear to be uncertain as to how to handle the situation, Julieta doesn't want them to feel ashamed, and rather confusingly, everyone involved seems to decide to support the brothers regardless of how their relationship evolves (rather than, say, get them to a therapist).
Anyway, Francisco's father lives exactly long enough to express concern over the brothers' overfamiliarity, then dies, seguing into Julieta's death 15 years later. After Julieta's funeral, Alexandre decides to move out and leave the family home to the two boys, and after a brief monologue from Thomàs about how their mother's death "clarified" things, he and Francisco immediately hop into bed (in a scene that's probably meant to be artful and meaningful, but comes off as... strange). And this is where things unravel a little bit in the movie. I wish we had seen different stages of their childhood, like perhaps their adolescence, and I wish we knew what their adult relationship was like prior to this point. While the timing of this consummation was likely at least in part to avoid any icky implications of Thomàs being underage or unable to truly consent, if they remained as close and boundary-less as they were as children, it stretches belief that they would only start fooling around once firmly into adulthood. There are hints later in the movie that the brothers always knew they would be together, but I wish I better understood why it happened when it happened.
So the brothers embark on being sickeningly in love, and entirely open about their relationship - Thomàs' swim coach is clearly quite aware and okay with it. (This is another element I ascribe to the "not our reality" theory - everyone around the brothers seems strangely accepting of them, and they're so enraptured with one another they barely seem to register that their relationship could be construed as problematic. I assume this is a world where sibling incest is about on par with being gay - a slightly unusual and non-mainstream lifestyle, but not as taboo as it is in our world.)
Conflict emerges when Thomàs, a competitive swimmer, is invited to train in Russia for three years for the next Olympics. It's the sort of opportunity that would be crazy to turn down, but Thomàs actually considers doing so, as the prospect of separation leaves both brothers distraught (interestingly, they don't seem to consider the possibility of Francisco coming with, if being apart is so distressing to them). Ultimately, Thomàs goes, and we see the brothers struggling with pining, loneliness, frustration, bickering, and poor decisions before things end the only way they possibly could - with Francisco flying to Russia and landing on his brother's doorstep.
Overall I enjoyed the movie, despite the issues mentioned above. The brothers' love story is often beautiful and touching, but the overall obsessiveness and excessiveness of the relationship also veers into the disturbing at times. I think the *concept* is very interesting - two siblings who seem to be born soulmates, who are in love and attracted to one another despite all taboos - but the second half of the movie in particular seems to try too hard to be artistic, and make every moment Deeply Meaningful, at risk of simply coming off as strange or mawkish. At the end of the day, it is probably best to view this movie as the simply telling of a story, without adding any extraneous social commentary. I would personally struggle to hang out with Thomàs and Francisco - but they're perfectly happy on their own anyway.
All-American Girl: The Mary Kay Letourneau Story (2000)
Disturbing
I just found out about this movie from a true crime forum, and as someone who has long followed this saga in the news, I wanted to check it out. This movie details the deeply disturbing relationship between 30something teacher Mary Kay Letourneau, and her preteen student, Vili Fulauu. For those who haven't followed the story, once Mary was released from prison and Vili was of age, they married. The last several years of their relationship appeared to be quite tumultuous, with separations and reconciliations creeping slowly towards divorce. However, Mary developed terminal cancer, and Vili returned to care for her until her death this past July.
Anyway, the movie takes a relatively sympathetic view towards Mary, but seems to try to explain her more than excuse her. One cannot watch more than a minute of this portrayal and think this is a healthy woman making sound decisions. Mary comes across as extremely childish, a mental teenager herself; sexually naive, extremely passive and submissive while also desperate for attention and approval. As the movie progresses, she builds a series of flimsy rationales for her decisions, and seems nearly delusional at times. The movie takes us through a number of moments where you want to yell at her to stop, to refuse, to go home, to send him home. But Mary becomes too flattered, too enthralled, too emotionally dependent on Vili to ever actually do it. These scenes reflect real-life moments as described by Mary and Vili, and recorded in case reports.
Vili is more straightforward, a precocious kid who talks a big game with his friends about how he's gonna tap the teacher, who eventually gets in way over his head. Vili was, is, hardly the first teenage boy to be hot for teacher, to be full of bluster, to flirt and charm and push the boundaries. But where Mary should have said no, she said yes. Where she should have discouraged, she encouraged. Vili got in deeper and deeper until he saw himself as in love with Mary. The narrative of him being the "aggressor" in their relationship is meant to fall flat, as if Mary had an iota better judgment than she did, she would have, and should have, kiboshed the whole thing long before it got that far. Vili wasn't an "aggressor", he was a boy playing a game, subtly egged on to take it further and further. For all Mary perceives him as an adult who just hasn't turned 18 yet, there are several moments where we see Vili emotional, vulnerable, impulsive, reminding the viewer that seriously, he's a kid.
So it went, both Mary and Vili perceived themselves as star-crossed lovers, ignoring the inconvenient fact that he was only 13 when the affair started. Mary's catastrophic failures in judgment are compounded by her failure to use any kind of birth control, resulting in two children before poor Vili had turned 15. The second born in prison.
One beef I have with this movie is the portrayal of Steve, Mary's husband. While their unhappy marriage has never been a secret, Steve is portrayed as an abusive brute in this film, seemingly as a way to highlight Mary's vulnerability and loneliness - and, perhaps, justify why she lapped up Vili's flirtations. I may be wrong, but in studying this case, I have never come across anything to suggest Steve was physically abusive to Mary.
I am a few years younger than Vili is today, and near the age Mary was when she began raping Vili. I cannot imagine ever doing the things she did or making the decisions she made. I cannot conceive of the desperation for male attention and approval that would lead to accepting those things from a child. I cannot conceive of being in my 30s and giggling over a teenage boy's eyes or calling him my soulmate. I cannot imagine throwing away my marriage, family, career, and dignity over a young boy's flattering words. Whether malicious or not, Mary was a deeply disturbed individual who swept herself and Vili into a toxic folie à deux that defined both their lives. While this movie is hardly a hard-hitting documentary, it actually does hit several points accurately, and succeeds in leaving you sick to your stomach while, at least on the surface, calling it a "love story."