‘The Nice Guys’ and Character Work
Everyone’s favorite movie about functioning alcoholics in 1977 Los Angeles can teach you a lot about shading in character backstory without exposition.
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A little drinking game I like to play when watching any film or TV show1 is to pay attention to how it depicts, well, drinking—or social substance use in general. You can tell immediately when a writer or creator doesn’t really use any substances themselves, because their depiction will be weirdly, strangely off2. I love it when people stride into bars on TV shows and order “a beer” or “a Scotch,” as if there weren’t 5,000 examples of each, in various categories and at various price points. Or when people are depicted as constantly hitting a vape while working or operating heavy machinery or just living their lives, with no visible impairment3. Or when hangovers are represented with a grimace and a groan and then the character is running marathons or doing complex math problems instead of puking their guts out and praying to heretofore unsuspected godlings for salvation4.
Or, most egregiously, when actors depict inebriation with broad, slurry, florid acting. This is especially true when the character is intended to be someone with a substance problem—TV shows and films regularly depict inebriation as if it’s all falling down and zero coping, when reality is pretty much the opposite: Drunk people are hyper aware that they’re drunk, and they put effort into masking it5.
Which brings us to The Nice Guys, the most unlikely sleeper hit of 2016. It’s a clever little movie, with some snappy writing by Shane Black and some terrific performances. But it really stands out as one of the sharpest character studies of functional alcoholics ever put on screen. In short, there’s some excellent character work in this goofy movie.
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In a visual media like film, character is a combination of the written word, the visuals the audience gets, and the performance of the actors. Bad writing overdoes the exposition, telling you things, usually in the most awkward way possible (having other characters tell each other things about themselves is a favorite dick move, as is asking questions everyone in the story already knows the answer to just so you can make a little speech)6. In The Nice Guys, however, there’s almost zero character exposition (there’s plenty of plot exposition, however). Like, zero. Which is unusual. Everything you know about Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe) and Holland March (Ryan Gosling) you get from visuals, performance, and the occasional organic bit of dialogue.
For example, Healy’s drinking problem. At the end of the film, Healy is fall-down drunk, sitting at a bar drinking straight from a bottle. It’s the first time in the film that he takes a drink; he spends the whole story refusing cocktails, but not in a showy way. If you’re not paying close attention, it might seem like he’s just in work mode, but the repetition of the refusal becomes meaningful. It’s really this detail that makes the final scene, where Healy is deep inside a bottle, land. When Holland jokes “At least you’re drinking again,” it’s a dark, dark line because of the Implications7.
Holland’s drinking is much more obvious. He’s pretty soaked throughout the film, and eventually we learn that his wife is dead and he blames himself for it. But it’s easy to see his boozing as casual and thematically appropriate both for the time period (Mad Men conditioned us to see the 1960s and 1970s as a sort of Booze Golden Age when everyone from your pediatrician to your first grade teacher had a bottle of Canadian Club in a drawer8) and the profession—Holland’s a private eye, after all, and as you know private dicks drink, and drink hard. So it’s not immediately obvious that Holland is in a lot of trouble9. The scene where his young daughter drives him home because he insisted on stopping off at a bar and tying one on towards the middle of the film is the first indication that Holland March has a serious drinking problem.
Both characters are functioning alcoholics. One is deep in a bender, one is deep in those regular attempts at self-regulating. And none of it is simply told to you. You have to just pick it up.
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The film is filled with these little details that come together to give you a very clear idea who these two men are. Holland is a functional drunk and often doesn’t seem inebriated—something alcoholics get very good at as they compensate for and learn to hide their disease10. But he’s unsteady and uncoordinated throughout, cutting his arm badly when he tries to break a window, stumbling and falling frequently, and demonstrating terrible, awful aim. At first glance he looks like a slightly tired Ryan Gosling, winning at life, but his behavior subtly shows how fucked up he is.
Jackson Healy very obviously doesn’t drink, but in a very short flashback to his wife informing him that she’s been having an affair with his father, he’s shown drinking wine, a subtle hint that his teetotalling is relatively recent and not a regular lifestyle for him.
And, of course, the character of Holly March (Angourie Rice) is a tragic portrait of the child of an alcoholic. She’s independent because she has to be—her father is usually too wasted to keep tabs on her. She acts as if the parent-child relationship is reversed. She’s eleven years old and knows how to drive in Los Angeles. She’s unfazed by anything in large part because she’s had to keep a poker face in response to all of her father’s misadventures. Everything you need to know about Holland March you can learn from his poor daughter—which also makes her final appearance in the film, standing guard in a tavern during the day, a tragedy. This kid doesn’t go to school. She doesn’t have a normal life. She’s totally screwed and will be in therapy for decades11.
And none of this is told to you, it’s shown. It’s solid writing, and is a big reason why this movie has become one of those culty movies that people keep discovering and then wondering why it wasn’t a bigger hit.
For some reason, my ears were burning throughout the writing of this essay. I have no idea why. My own relationship with substances is perfectly healthy and innocent12.
Next Week: A movie you never saw demonstrates the pitfalls of motivating your character.
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The rules are to just drink steadily until everything improves. I don’t want to brag, but it usually works.
“Mr. Smith ordered a bottle of Jack Daniels with a side order of mescal, mixed them in a bowl and proceeded to slurp from it using his personal drinking spoon, grunting in extremely normal human pleasure as he did so.”
Meanwhile, if I have one beer my whole night is basically over in terms of concentration and writing work. I used to romanticize the alcoholic genius writer cliche, imagining myself like Keuroac, sweatily drunk with a bottle next to my typewriter as I banged out a classic banger of a novel, but quickly realized that would never actually work. And then I was sad, and I’ve been lowkey sad ever since.
In many TV shows, hangovers are momentary moments of regret instead of day long gauntlets of white-knuckle survival. Wait … do I drink too much? Don’t answer that.
My own efforts to feign sobriety are undone because Drunk Jeff thinks the world has been waiting to hear him sing. I get it from my father, who spent many nights with headphones on absolutely shredding Clancy Brothers songs.
The easiest clue that you’re watching a bad movie is when characters use the phrase “as you know”:
Pierre le Chat: Why are we trying to save this person?
Monique Gremlins: As you know, he’s my husband, and your best friend, who you swore to always save if he was in trouble.
Pierre le Chat: Right! As you know, I suffered a lot of traumatic brain injury a few years ago, and now I forget things.
Monique Gremlins: As you know, I am a world-class brain surgeon, and I saved your life.
I’m actually starting to enjoy writing this little vignette, so let’s stop before I write a novel entitled GREMLINS AND CHAT right here in the footnotes and become a millionaire author of leisure.
The other dark part of this is how fucking happy and relieved other drinkers are when someone gives up trying to stay sober and falls off the wagon. Their dark joy at someone’s failure to sober up is palpable, and The Nice Guys gets that.
My father worked at a bank in the 1970s, can confirm that everyone was pretty much tipsy pretty much all the time.
It also helps that he looks like Ryan Gosling, because we’re trained to imagine alcoholics are sweaty, gruesome folks with three-day beards and shaking hands. That comes later.
Similar to the way I work to hide my general stupidity by wearing a monocle and answering every question with a question.
One imagines when she grows tall enough to reach the liquor cabinet at home things are going to get interesting.
Is “My Relationship with Substances is Perfectly Healthy and Innocent” the title of my memoir? Yes.
On my watchlist for tonight.
No, you aren't the only one thinking about how crusty and smelly those clothes must be.