Though derided at the time as anachronistic temperance propaganda, D.W. Griffith's Prohibition-era melodrama, The Struggle (1931) survives today as masterful, empathetic, and forward-thinking cinema.
Telling the story of a genial breadwinner who nearly loses everything to booze, Griffith allows us to understand his protagonist's attraction to alcohol without demonizing or glamorizing it. An early scene set at a raucous speakeasy establishes the movie's overall visual elegance and empathy, as convulsive choreography, fluid blocking, and the actors' nimble physicality take us inside everyman Jimmie’s (Hal Skelly) drunken revelry rather than merely gawk at his shame.
After a brief but taut interlude depicting Jimmie’s gradually slipping sobriety amidst an otherwise tranquil domestic life with his wife and daughter, Griffith stages a harrowing and protracted party scene that is the film’s remarkable centerpiece. Building immense suspense by juxtaposing the gaiety of the partygoers with Jimmie’s impending drunken meltdown, Griffith pays particular attention to his wife's burgeoning horror at the situation and the scene chimes with deep empathy for her and all the innocent bystanders caught in the path of a drunk's tornado.
Griffith invests each episode in the character’s decline with an expressive balance of specificity and symbolism, never coasting on formula. Griffith renders the character’s dislocation with uncommon poetry in one striking scene where Jimmie gazes out at his estranged daughter's figure through the window, funereal organ music wafting into the now-empty apartment they used to share. Artfully composed but rooted in raw emotion, the scene shows how dependency removes a person from the relationships that make life worth living and instead of muffling, actually amplifies, the yearning for connection.
The Struggle also eschews any inquiry into Jimmie’s motivation for picking up a drink, portraying alcoholism as an immutable disease instead of a defect with clear-cut external or moral causes. The narrative structure itself, ever-lurching towards the next degrading episode, conveys the inexorable and progressive nature of his addiction with such subtle temporal details as how the characters' apartments decrease in size and adornment as a consequence of their worsening financial health.
A poignant testament to his deeply personal grasp of the material, Griffith himself succumbed to alcoholism not long after the scathing response to The Struggle – his last film. He spent the rest of his days drinking in isolation, a fate at sad odds with the redemption and renewal he saw possible in Jimmie’s story.
Telling the story of a genial breadwinner who nearly loses everything to booze, Griffith allows us to understand his protagonist's attraction to alcohol without demonizing or glamorizing it. An early scene set at a raucous speakeasy establishes the movie's overall visual elegance and empathy, as convulsive choreography, fluid blocking, and the actors' nimble physicality take us inside everyman Jimmie’s (Hal Skelly) drunken revelry rather than merely gawk at his shame.
After a brief but taut interlude depicting Jimmie’s gradually slipping sobriety amidst an otherwise tranquil domestic life with his wife and daughter, Griffith stages a harrowing and protracted party scene that is the film’s remarkable centerpiece. Building immense suspense by juxtaposing the gaiety of the partygoers with Jimmie’s impending drunken meltdown, Griffith pays particular attention to his wife's burgeoning horror at the situation and the scene chimes with deep empathy for her and all the innocent bystanders caught in the path of a drunk's tornado.
Griffith invests each episode in the character’s decline with an expressive balance of specificity and symbolism, never coasting on formula. Griffith renders the character’s dislocation with uncommon poetry in one striking scene where Jimmie gazes out at his estranged daughter's figure through the window, funereal organ music wafting into the now-empty apartment they used to share. Artfully composed but rooted in raw emotion, the scene shows how dependency removes a person from the relationships that make life worth living and instead of muffling, actually amplifies, the yearning for connection.
The Struggle also eschews any inquiry into Jimmie’s motivation for picking up a drink, portraying alcoholism as an immutable disease instead of a defect with clear-cut external or moral causes. The narrative structure itself, ever-lurching towards the next degrading episode, conveys the inexorable and progressive nature of his addiction with such subtle temporal details as how the characters' apartments decrease in size and adornment as a consequence of their worsening financial health.
A poignant testament to his deeply personal grasp of the material, Griffith himself succumbed to alcoholism not long after the scathing response to The Struggle – his last film. He spent the rest of his days drinking in isolation, a fate at sad odds with the redemption and renewal he saw possible in Jimmie’s story.
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