Review of Smashed (2012) by Christopher P — 27 May 2013

Not terrible but not great. Decent premise: a young, married couple mostly gets through life with some help from the bottle (ha, the wife even tries crack once!). So, what happens when one of them stops drinking? Can the relationship survive?

As some imdb posters pointed out, the movie is mostly cliche...stuff you've seen before. I think the best movie about this is still When a Man Loves a Woman. Winstead is decent as the lead female. Obnoxious at the start when she is drinking but she settles in. Paul is pretty much the same character he is in Breaking Bad. He just doesn't do much but is somehow effective. I did like the dynamic of her choosing to stop drinking while he did not. I'm not sure they took it as far as I would have on the storyline, but they did take it pretty far (I guess...my dvd would not play well and I missed the final 20 minutes though read about it online).

So, it's an indie flick so I would have liked to see it be maybe a little more edgy and explorative. But the ending, as I read it, sounds pretty decent. A conversation point for sure on imdb. But I think it would almost be inevitable, and that was the best way to fully emphasize just how big a change the wife made in her life.