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Does this trio of films signal a new wave or just a coincidence? That is hard to say, since pictures that glorify the communal joys of tippling can still magnetize moviegoers; Cocktail, starring Tom Cruise as a bartender who becomes famous for 15 martinis, earned $27 million in its first ten days of release. And any serious film has a handicap. When Bright Lights, Big City sent Michael J. Fox to the lower-middle depths of coke craving, audiences sniffed and stayed away. "Will people go to Clean and Sober?" wonders its co-producer Tony Ganz. "If they have a problem with alcoholism, they may refuse to go. If they don't have a problem, they may not want to go." Yet it is good to see Hollywood emerging from its binge of party-till-you-puke teen comedies and issuing the warning "Substance abuse may be hazardous to your health."
It used to be that movie screeds about drinking and drugs were hazardous only at the box office. As Wired Co-Producer Ed Feldman notes, "You can't do an hour-and-45-minute sermon." TV movies, with their captive middle-aged audiences and their social diseases of the week, were the place for tidy moralizing. But traditionally, the big screen and its youthful audience welcomed the happy drunk. For early moviegoers, booze was a truth serum that liberated every endearing character from Charlie Chaplin to Dumbo. It can still cadge cheap laughs: in this summer's License to Drive, a teenager's dream girl does a drunken dance on his dad's car hood. For the '60s generation, the use of recreational drugs was a gesture of political defiance, and movies mimicked it. "Drugs weren't a by-product of our culture," says Glenn Gordon Caron, 34, the Moonlighting mogul who directed Clean and Sober. "They were our culture."
In the overdue national detox program that may be the '90s, the drug culture could change. On movie screens it already has. Film Critic Roger Ebert, who has ragged Hollywood for glamourizing alcoholics, is hopeful: "Today you have creative people finding solutions." Clean and Sober will give an early clue to that solution. Will American moviegoers find the tonic chill of a dramatized A.A. lecture as bracing as the sight of a rabbit who can act like a boozehound? Stay tuned.