Review of The Panic in Needle Park (1971) by Dalia D — 26 Sep 2007

The fact of the matter is that The Panic in Needle Park is so grim and gritty that it makes the lurid technicolor dreamscape of Midnight Cowboy look like nothing worse than Mr. Toad's Wild Ride at Disneyland. I live in what used to be Needle Park (well, not the park itself, of course, but the neighborhood, around the corner from the park), so despite my revulsion of needles, and heroin use in particular, I was itching to see this movie. My grandfather lived higher up on the Upper West Side, and I remember not feeling safe there in the 80s, and despite the extreme gentrification of my neighborhood, I do see the occasional few Needle-Parkers hanging around Gray's Papaya, or under the perpetual scaffold on the corner past Starbuck's. Many of them are old enough to be the originals, and probably are; they've certainly been immobile for the two years I've lived here.

Maybe Needle Park is grittier because 1971 was worse for New York than 1969, or maybe it's because Joan Didion and hubby John Gregory Dunne had a better sense of human drama and suffering. I think it's because heroin is the worst thing that can happen to a person, ever; it's worse than being alone, worse than resorting to prostitution, worse than sickness, and worse than deathâ??probably because it leads to all of these things, without the peace of the sweet hereafter.

And there is no peace for Kitty Winn's sad and lovely and hideous Helen, once she's submitted. As the picture begins, she's left her small-town Midwestern home for New York and is living the Bohemian life, shacked up with an artist/lover; she's an artist as well. Her boyfriend's dealer comes over to the apartment one day that she's feeling sick and dreadful; she's just had "a free scrape," and the botched abortion has left her bleeding and depressed. The dealerâ??Al Pacino as Bobbyâ??is instantly taken with her, and gives her his scarf to help her keep warm; when she later checks into the hospital, still bleeding, he sneaks into her room for a visit. From that point on, the other artist is history, and she's Bobby's girl. He has the sweet and reckless madcap attractiveness you saw in Jared Leto's Harry in Requiem for a Dream (the entire cast and crew of Requiem, I think, must have studied Needle Park fairly carefully; the television that Harry repeatedly steals from his mother and pawns is an exaggeration of the television Bobby picks up off the delivery truck and pawns to pay for his first date with Helen). She is clean and windy, in corduroy and knits, but somehow not intimidated by his petty theft, his career as small-time heroin dealer, his thuggish older brother, or his assorted junkie friends. She holes up in a filthy prewar studio (looks like mine!) with ten of them while they shoot up and pass out, and the camera offers us the longest shot of a needle crudely shoved into a vein in all of film history, I'm certain. If you're anything like I am, your eyes are squeezed tightly, you're writhing in your seat, and your guts are turning over.

It isn't long, of course, before Bobby goes from "chipping" to shooting up with a lot more regularity, and one night while he's sleeping, Helenâ??lonely and curiousâ??does to herself what she's seen everyone around her doing. Not long after, Bobby is picked up by the cops, and while he serves time in prison, no one is there to take care of Helen, now a certifiable junkie with an eighty dollar-a-day habit. To service her needs, she services the sexual needs of whomever will pay, including Bobby's own brother. Bobby comes out of the clinker clean only to find the girl he loves has become filthy. Verbal abuse ensues, but it isn't long before they are together again, now hustling with a one-two punch con in which Helen brings home a trick, and Bobby come in early, smacks him around, and takes all of his money. Are you sick and sad yet? Bobby gets a deal with a big-time dealer, and the young lovers are excited at the prospect of having all the smack they've ever dreamed of, but heroin addiction knows no bounds. The cops pick up Helen for trying to sell some pills on the street, and to buy her way out of prison, she agrees to set up Bobby. At the movie's end, she meets him outside the prison doors the day he gets out. At least they're both still alive. For how much longer, we don't know. My expectations are low.