Shaken and stirring

Seven great films about drinking

So many great movies involve vice—sex, drugs, food and, of course, alcohol. Movies about drinking in particular tend to be either cautionary or comedic tales, and sometimes a tragicomic mélange of both. 

Whether you’re a teetotaler looking for a morality play, a cocktail nerd craving inspiration, or a libertine film junkie out for a self-affirming reason to get smashed, this not-at-all comprehensive list of worthwhile movies about boozers will get you started.

“Strange Brew” (1983)
The sweetly moronic Bob and Doug McKenzie (Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis, reprising their famed “SCTV” roles) get jobs at a remote, Val Lewton-inspired brewery, ostensibly for the imagined lifetime supply of free beer. Despite their simple motivations, the brothers find themselves ensnared in a murderous family plot—a bizarre plan by Brewmeister Smith (Max von Sydow), who endeavors to take over the world with mind-controlling suds. It’s a goofy gem filled with memorable scenes and dialogue that nerds of a certain age still warmly quote (“Take off, hoser!”). Between this and “Flash Gordon,” it took years for me to reconcile that von Sydow starred in some of Ingmar Bergman’s most influential films.

“Sideways” (2004)
Writer and director Alexander Payne’s Oscar-winning comedy finds college friends Miles and Jack (Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church) on a weeklong vacation in California wine country. Miles is a failed writer fresh off a divorce; Jack is using the trip as a bacchanalian excuse to bed as many women as possible in the face of his impending marriage. It’s a mid-life crisis comedy of errors (and not dissimilar from another film on this list) that plays their increasingly rose-colored and fraying friendship against Payne’s expertly deadpan direction. Thanks to Giamatti, drinking merlot will never be the same again.

“Hey Bartender” (2013)
On a certain level, the bar is a stage, and bartenders are rock stars—dedicated, talented, driven, and a little drunk on themselves. The vocation of mixology is creative, sexy and very lucrative under the right circumstances. Writer/director Douglas Triola’s partly inspirational, partly taunting documentary focuses on two bartenders: an ex-Marine who aspires to become an expert drink slinger at Employees Only—a revered NYC bar at the center of the craft cocktail boom—and a veteran bar owner in Connecticut who resists the craft trend even as he watches his antiquated pub slowly die. The movie is both a joyous celebration of bartending culture and a mournful portrait of a business in its twilight years. It’ll make you consider a career change, if only for a moment.

“Smashed” (2012)
It’s all wine and roses until it isn’t. Alcohol, like most addictions, has a dark side. The cracks in one’s denial slowly split open as dependence invariably influences all other considerations. Those compulsions overtake Kate (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a young school teacher whose addictive personality begins to encroach on her job and marriage to Charlie (Aaron Paul). We catch her just as it’s all unraveling—she’s graduated from run-of-the-mill social embarrassment to genuinely risky decision-making (drunkenly smoking crack with a stranger and passing out in an alley). At work, Kate fakes a pregnancy to hide her disease from her peers. This might sound didactic, but director and co-writer James Ponsoldt (“The Spectacular Now,” “The End of the Tour”)—an uncommonly thoughtful and sensitive filmmaker—manages to avoid preachiness. Ponsoldt showcases two career-best performances from his leads, and his naturalistic focus on Kate’s demons sets “Smashed” apart.

“Leaving Las Vegas” (1995)
Though there are many stories about the slow suicide of crippling addiction (chief among them Billy Wilder’s “The Lost Weekend,” to which “Vegas” is at least partially indebted), director Mike Figgis’ nihilistic tale of co-dependency and despair knows few peers. Having lost everything to the bottle, a failed screenwriter (Nicolas Cage) falls in with a Vegas hooker (Elizabeth Shue) as he purposefully drinks himself to death amidst the venal chaos of Sin City. Nominated for just about everything, Cage’s Oscar-winning turn and an equally powerful performance by Shue are unforgettable in the most haunting sense.

“Barfly” (1987)
As for reprobate alcoholic writers who actually got famous, there’s Barbet Schroeder’s flawed but compulsively watchable “Barfly.” Based on the life of (and adapted for the screen by) acclaimed poet, novelist and noted drinker Charles Bukowski, “Barfly” grittily romanticizes the lower depths that serendipitously made Bukowski a modern-day literary Bruegel—a poet of the peasants. As Bukowski’s alter-ego, Hank Chinaski, Mickey Rourke is in peak form, and the toxic chemistry he shares with Faye Dunaway’s Wanda is a terrible cinematic relationship for the ages.

“Withnail & I” (1987)
Writer/director Bruce Robinson’s cult classic is a smorgasbord of urbane Britishness that’ll leave you either in stitches or utterly mystified as to why it gets so much love. Two boozing, unemployed actors (the sweetly sensible Paul McGann and the deliciously bent Richard E. Grant) in swinging 1969 London go on holiday in the countryside and wind up on a fish-out-of-water misadventure that lays bare their very worst impulses. If you thrive on witty countercultural black comedy with flair, “Withnail & I” is probably your cup of tea.

For more from Joe, read his reviews of "Tangerine" and "Straight Outta Compton."