User Reviews

This is a naturalistic look at the problems ordinary people have in kicking hard drugs. By "ordinary", I mean that these are people who aren't denizens of the underworld. Drugs are around, yes, and they do get used, sometimes habitually, but the characters have jobs and children and cars and generally live working class lives. They're not Al Pacino in "The Panic in Needle Park," scooting around in search of a score and accusing his friends of "using my wake-up hit!" By "naturalistic", I mean that the dialog and incidents in which they are embedded are slow in tempo and don't sound or look "scripted." Nobody gives anybody else a lecture on dope. Nobody says anything like, "Either you control it or it controls YOU." No dramatic scenes of anyone going cold turkey. No violence of any kind. Practically no score.

At heart, it's Vera Farmiga's story. She's married to a guy who does occasional coke himself but is not sensitive. She has two little kids -- one of whom seems to be able to actually act. Farmiga enters one of those twelve-step programs to help her keep clean and forms a particular bond with one of the counselors. At her own initiation, the bond gets more intense, and she winds up taking a little honeymoon trip to the city with her. But in their motel room she playfully enters the room where he's taking a shower and finds him shooting heroin. "I just wanted it to be really good," he explains in a daze.

The pair are arrested during a traffic stop and when hubby discovers what's been going on, he throws her out. She loses her job at the supermarket checkout counter because when she was high, she was fast and accurate, but now, sober, she's slowed down, careless, and sometimes irritating.

Farmiga takes her kids and moves in with her ex-counselor, having no place else to go. He's supposed to be on methadone and maybe he is, but he's also doing some kind of anti-anxiety agent on top because he looks and acts high and takes short naps during the day. Finally she tells him to leave and he does. The end.

Vera Farmiga is quite a good actress. She has an idiosyncratically plain face that could lend itself to a variety of roles -- a long nose, a twisted mouth, and eyes that always seem a bit stricken. Nice figure too. The ex-counselor (Hugh Dillon) doesn't get to display his chops that much, not being the central figure, but he's got the right combination of shambling concern for others and sub-rosa perfidy. They're both good, but then no one in the film gives a sour performance.

The writing has some distinct touches. Farmiga visits a pet store and buys a corn snake (Elaphe gutatta) for her children. As the pet store manager says, it's a beautiful and well-tempered serpent, pale buff with burnt-orange blotches down its back. We get to see a lot of the snake in its glass terrarium. It's non-offensive -- silent, slow, maybe inquisitive. Beautiful. The last we see of it is when the kids drop a cute albino mouse into the terrarium. The two animals nose one another for a few second and then -- ZAP -- the snake snaps up the mouse in its jaws and covers it with coils. It's a constrictor and it smothers the mouse and eats it. This is known as an analogy. The beautiful well-tempered tame thing turns out to be the strangler of its innocent victim. This visual message is infinitely more effective than a dozen lectures on the danger of things that look and feel good for the moment but are ultimately lethal by their very nature.

Nobody exactly understands how addiction works, let alone how to get rid of it most effectively. There is the opponent process theory that we manufacture our own dope when we need it and the dope glues itself to receptors especially built into our nervous system to get us temporarily high when we need to be. Artificial dope gloms onto the same receptors. If used often enough, the artificial dope prompts the body to produce more and more receptors, and it keeps the nervous system in a steady state. If you stop the surges of artificial dope, all those extra receptors start crying out, "Where the hell is our DOPE?" And of course there are cultural factors at work, but moving to an Eskimo community might not work either. I've known users who lived in small towns near Nome, Alaska. You can get it anywhere there is a market demand. Maybe a small town in rural Utah might work, but ordinary people can't afford to do that, and the simple facts are that a user has a very difficult hand to play, as this film demonstrates.

"Down to the Bone" is about Irene (Vera Farmiga) and Bob (Hugh Dillon) who relapse together after getting clean from drugs. Irene is a supermarket cashier and is married to Steve (Clint Jordan), who's friendly but clueless about addiction, since he enables Irene thoughtlessly both before and after recovery. They have two little boys.

The first thing you notice is how effortlessly natural Farmiga is in her scenes with the boys. It gradually sinks in also that this movie avoids drug rehab clichés. Irene isn't having wild fun. All she needs is a little bit to get by – every day. When her stash runs out, she gets anxious; and when she tries to use grandma's birthday check for one of the boys to score and gets rebuffed by her dealer, she checks into a realistically ugly and ordinary rehab program. This film also excels for the specific feel of its upstate New York locations.

Appropriately, this gray, hard time of Irene's rehab and her attempt to stay clean comes in the long upstate winter. A male nurse named Bob met Irene at Halloween and then there was a little sizzle of attraction, the lighting of cigarettes. Bob turns out to be working at the rehab clinic and takes a personal interest – too personal – in her. At first he does all the right things – or does he? He gets a little too close on institutional time.

Irene leaves rehab too soon – after only one week – because of her job and kids. She can't handle her job straight and gets fired from the store. Irene's Latina pal from rehab, Lucy (Caridad de la Cruz), who cleans houses with her after that, warns her she's "thirteenth-stepping" – a 12-step term meaning to risk clean time in risky romancing with another recovering addict – in this case Bob – to fill the big void left when drugs are withdrawn.

Bob is an interesting, specific person. Hugh Dillon's performance is up to the level of Farmiga's. Originally the model or recovery, Bob's improper "thirteenth-stepping" relationship with Irene – which she initiates – but both are ready for this mistake – leads him back to a worse addiction than hers – heroin – which he's been off of for five years. Together, they are poison for each other. They soon get into a situation leading to an arrest for possession. They drive to the city and she gets a piercing and they buy the boys the pet snake they've been wanting. While she's being pierced, Bob scores a bag and goes back out. After the arrest, Steve kicks Irene out. She gets a suspended sentence with treatment, including rehab and 250 hours of NA meetings in a year. If she deviates, she goes to jail.

This may be it, the "bottom" leading to lasting recovery for Irene. But this is a knowing and realistic version of the drug recovery experience and it lacks simple climaxes or resumption's. Irene is still cleaning houses with Lucy, still dealing with her kids and their pet snake (which becomes an obvious, if gentle, symbol of temptation), and Bob's still around ""helping" along his Methadone doses with illegally acquired barbiturates and lying to Irene about it.

As the film ends, Irene kicks Bob out of her house and he says "I'll never get clean alone." Catch-22: he'll never get clean with her, either.

"Down to the Bone," though indie gold, is, frankly, only a tiny blip on the big screen. Though it won prizes at Sundance few will see it or want to. Though it achieves a remarkable degree of authenticity, it could use some sharper editing – and some smiles. For addicts ready for recovery, getting high usually has stopped being fun. But this movie forgets that it ever was fun, and strangers to the drug life may wonder what's going on here. But then, they never do understand: that's why there are 12-step meetings, which the movie might have said more about, since most addicts who make it, in America anyway, do it through the Twelve Steps, going to meetings, getting a sponsor, and working the steps. Rehab alone rarely does the trick. This is the kind of movie that, for good or ill, Sundance loves but mainstream audiences avoid. It's very good, but also very grim.