Bothered and Bewildered, indeed.

Bewitched, not so much

Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, starring Ethan Hawke as Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart, has a 90% Tomatometer rating, an Academy Award nomination for its lead actor, and my sister’s personal recommendation. So I watched it. It was the most uncomfortable hour and forty minutes I’ve spent since the last time I was in the dentist’s chair. (Full disclosure: I don’t actually hate the dentist. He gives me nitrous.)

This is not to say that there’s anything wrong with the movie as a movie; the acting, direction, set dec, and lighting/sound design are all better than the usual filmed play. As small movies go, this is a good one. It’s March 31, 1943, and Lorenz Hart is waiting at Sardi’s restaurant to congratulate his former partner, Richard Rodgers, on the success of Oklahoma!, the Broadway musical Rodgers wrote with his new lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein. Hart spends the time drinking (after claiming to be on the wagon) and obsessing over a girl half his age whom he spent an afternoon with six months earlier.

What can I say? I just don’t enjoy spending time with an alcoholic love addict bottoming out in front of my eyes. It’s not fun in real life, and it was not fun on screen. We addicts are not a vision for you when we are in our disease. And while Robert Kaplow’s script absolutely understands that this is a hopeless alcoholic (he dies drunk in a gutter in the opening scene, after all), I’m not convinced the movie understands how desperate his love addiction was.

It’s possible they thought the guy who wrote “Isn’t It Romantic” was just that: a hopeless romantic. That’s how he has been remembered in pop history, after all. But listen again to the lyrics of “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered”: “I’m wild again / Beguiled again / A simpering, whimpering child again…” Sure, crushes make teenagers of us all. But a simpering, whimpering child? Deep down, Hart himself knows that there is something wrong with his fantasies and obsessions. Is Hawke’s version of Hart meant to be empathetic—or just plain pathetic?

I’m not here to dissuade you from seeing a film you probably weren’t going to see anyway, Oscar nom or no Oscar nom. I simply can’t stop myself from waving my arms in desperation when love addiction is portrayed as “irrational adoration” and the object of addictive desire as “transcendent.” As Hart says of the shot of whiskey he downs, after swearing he’s on the wagon: “How can so much pleasure be compressed into so small a container?”

He says basically the same thing about his crush, Elizabeth—except she’s not in a small container: she’s a foot taller than he is. Also, 27 years younger. But the intoxication is the same: “Did you guys see her hair? That’s what I first noticed when she walked into the theater last July. It was as if she were breathing different air than I was,” he sighs. “I wish I had a photograph of every moment I’ve spent with her.”

In therapy speak, alcohol and Elizabeth do the same things for Hart: they suspend time. They anesthetize loss. They allow desire without consequence. The object differs; the neuro-emotional circuitry does not. Neither alcohol nor Elizabeth threatens him with real intimacy, accountability, or growth. They only threaten him with disappearance.

It should be noted that young Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley) is also a budding love addict. After being dumped by the hit-it-and-quit-it guy she’d been obsessing over for a year, she says: “If he called me right now—right this very second—I’d drop everything in my life and… drive three hours, drive 30 hours just to spend one more night with him.” Hart sighs. Ah. Isn’t it romantic?

Not really. Sometimes, it’s just lethal.