Broken Vessels

this film came out about the same time as "bringing out the dead". with all due respect to Martin and Nick-this is the movie they could have made if hollywood hadn't warped the way a story is told. style over substance. with that said-this is a tough film to watch. the performances are dead solid perfect. the voice over is a difficult device to pull off and it doesn't always work here, but... there was a truth that i wanted to watch play out.

I came out of Broken Vessels feeling like I was 19 again, like nothing mattered except the next rush. The passing cars with their people going home from work, and the rest of the pedestrian surroundings, meant nothing to me. Which is very similar to the two main characters in this movie. This film is a raw, intense trip, shot all over the gritty side of L.A. I grew up here, and the film is true to the city, at least this perspective of it. The major flaw in Broken Vessels is that there was no universal theme, no message it delivered. The movie didn't seem to be *about* anything other than its own story. But the visual and emotional experience I got while viewing the film, in large part due to excellent directing by Scott Ziehl and acting by Todd Field, was well worth the price of admission.

This is a neat little movie with a lot of energy and control - it's not overly flashy or gimmicky and doesn't indulge in excessive Tarantino-aping; the Field character is truly sleazy, but the movie keeps everything within plausible limits of degradation and loss of control, so that his pull on London is easy to understand without losing moral perspective. It's a two-hander at heart, but through various secondary characters - especially Field's Gramps, a hopeless drug addict - it manages to carve out a plausible broader social base (even if you wonder how the guys ever manage to get through any of their shifts intact). Some of the specific exposition is tedious, or overly familiar and dutiful, or just marginally amusing, but the meat of it lies simply in colourful incident, and in that regard it has real panache and sense of character.

I was floored by this movie. Having spent seven years in various Washington state prisons alongside the disenfranchised casualties of the idiotic and doomed "war on drugs",I am no stranger to the deleterious effects of drug abuse and I thought this movie was one of the very few anti-drug movies that really got the message across without preaching or appearing to glamorize drugs. Jason London quite impressed me with his portrayal of a small town innocent corrupted by big city vices. But the film belongs to Todd Field; he gives an Oscar-worthy performance.This is a classic, really. Right up there with Dugstore Cowboy.

This is a film that once seen, the viewer will never forget. I'm at a loss for the low score here at IMDb. The performances are riveting and the depiction of generational drug abuse is something of which to take notice.

Those that think this dumps on the EMT profession, need to get real. What? You think that there are no abusers in this field of work? In fact, the one time I had to ride in a "bus," the EMT was starting an IV and I said "you guys haven't been cruising the park before coming here, have you?" He started laughing and told me how much he loved this film.

Of course, these guys could have been in any profession, but the superior irony would have been lost. This is one drug film I can recommend without hesitation, as it is chilling and stark. It in no way "glamorizes" drug use or the culture.