Ironweed (1987)

Saw Ironweed, a beautiful bummer of a film about an alcoholic bum living in skid row in Albany, NY.  The film is very pretty to look at.  It has the fuzzy colors and dim lighting of a Rembrandt painting.  It's set in the 30s and contains many gorgeously weathered faces.  There are weird characters and nice observations, but I have a hard time tackling the film.  I have a hard time of telling what, apart from sadness, was the film about?

Now, films don't have to have a message to them to be good, and sad films have a place: they force us to confront uncomfortable topics and to feel bad for people we may otherwise just dismiss.  This film explores the main characters' life, flitting through his childhood and exploring his present-day misery.  We learn early on that he's wracked by guilt over the death of his son and the film may just be that this man's hell is of his own creation, however the events are more ambiguous than that.  some childhood sexual abuse is implied, and he is literally haunted by his past.  It may be of his own making, but it is not clear that this is his own choice.

Meryl Streep steals the film in a supporting role as another drunk homeless lady.  Her performance is (as always) perfect and simultaneously sympathetic, believable, and repellent.  Her past is more obscure however and we only get hints of some past life on the stage.  At one point she drunkenly screams about her mother and sister who she refers to as thieves.  Is she too wallowing in self-pity?  What about Tom Waits' character, who is dying from cancer but who is too bemused, distracted, or crazy to be bothered by that fact?

The film is beautiful and sad, austere and spare.  I liked how small but dense everything was.  The characters have a full on physical fight, melt-down, and reconciliation within the space of about 10 minutes and within the physical space of an alley-way.  It had a stagey feeling of confinement and containment to its scenes.  It was also gorgeously shot in muted, warm, period-picture browns and blacks.

It's a film that feels ambiguous to me, but maybe I just haven't found the key to it yet, or am misreading it: looking for something that isn't there.  It's a pretty and sad film, and I'm not sure what it is beyond that.