'How much money do you think we can make from this?' FH asks. They spend an afternoon stripping the copper wires out of an empty house. 'That's my wife,' says FH's newfound barroom buddy Wayne ( Denis Leary). Like the fat kid who races after their car and runs into the pole. It's episodic, and there are moments that stand out like sharp memories in a confused time. Crudup is a good partner for her, coming in under her radar, ready for whatever she has in mind.īut the movie is not just about (or even really about) FH and Michelle. Here she plays a woman who is more or less the result of the situation she's gotten herself into: If you are going to use drugs and don't have infinite money, you are going to have to make some compromises. Samantha Morton you will remember from Woody Allen's ' Sweet And Lowdown,' where she played a mute.

They aren't putting on a show for the camera, but feeding at each other's lips. They are so screwed up that when the movie lingers on the sight of them kissing, we realize with a stir that their kissing is direct and needy, not movie-stylized.

Their romance, when it is working, has a kind of tenderness that grows out of their suffering. Drugs or love: You sort of have to choose one or the other, because you can't pay attention to both. The thing about FH and Michelle ( Samantha Morton) is that they love each other, in a fashion, but are inhabiting a lifestyle that has too many distractions for any kind of continuity. Their lives are too episodic to add up to a novel the highs and lows settle out into disconnected adventures and anecdotes, separated by voids and blackouts. I think short stories are right for a story about druggies.

Some will complain that the episodes jostle too loosely against one another (it's 'a barbiturate-driven version of `Pulp Fiction,' in which the guns misfire and the cars don't have brakes,' writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir, in a negative but somehow affectionate review). The movie's director is Alison Maclean, a New Zealander whose screenplay (by Elizabeth Cuthrell, David Urrutia and Oren Moverman) is based on short stories by the American author Denis Johnson. He isn't a hero or an anti-hero, just a fairly clueless guy with good intentions who gets muddled by the drug lifestyle-which creates a burden the mind is not really designed to endure. FH ( Billy Crudup) narrates the story, sometimes doubling back to fill in gaps or add overlooked details. It doesn't glamorize drugs or demonize them, but simply remembers them from the point of view of a survivor. But this is not a drug movie like any you've seen.

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