MOVIE REVIEW : A Drug Film of Our Times

You could probably chart the mood of the country by looking at how the movies have portrayed drug usage. In the “Man With the Golden Arm” era, drugs represented a jazzy slide into sin city. In the days of “The Trip,” they were freak-show psychedelia. In the “Easy Rider” period, drugs were a way for the counterculture to opt out of a hateful society and fly high. “Drugstore Cowboy” showed off its druggies as forlorn, groggy desperadoes. “Jungle Fever” exhibited them as denizens of a zoo-like inferno.

The new film “Rush,” based on a loosely autobiographical novel by Kim Wozencraft, a former undercover narc operating in East Texas, takes place in 1975. But its mood of dreary resignation and moral ambiguity seems contemporary; it’s a drug movie for the backwash of the drug era, when the euphoria has turned glum and nightmarish. There’s no liberating upside to the drug usage in this film, and no down-and-dirty exploitation either. The filmmakers, first-time director Lili Fini Zanuck and screenwriter Pete Dexter, have the conviction to show how boring the addict’s life is. In the process, they may have dampened down too much of their material. The film (which opens Sunday at selected theaters) is “distinguished” without being particularly gripping.

Kristen Cates (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is a rookie narc who is recruited by Jim Raynor (Jason Patric) to be his partner in a sweeping series of busts in a small Texas town. Prodded by the corrupt police chief to nab a local pusher and pornographer (played with mute creepiness by Gregg Allman), they end up falsifying evidence. En route, both get hooked on their own stash, particularly Jim, who spends a fair amount of his time looking droolly and glassy-eyed.

The early scenes between Jim and Kristen have a chilling matter-of-factness. Kristen may have a pert, babyish face and the demeanor of an ice-cream parlor waitress--which, in fact, she was before becoming a cop--but there’s something eerie about her girl-next-door quality. She says she wants to be a narc so that she can make a difference, but her truest moment comes when she confesses she “likes being scared.”

Kristen has the kind of scrubbed all-Americanness that’s hard to fathom, and it’s this unreachable quality that links her with the glassy-eyed Jim and the other druggies who parade about in their cowboy boots in a constant state of wary paranoia. Jennifer Jason Leigh does something quite difficult in the role: She uses her faraway quality to bring us close to her.

The film implies that it was Kristen’s blank quality that turned her on to being a narc: A person with no real sense of self is capable of assuming many different selves. By linking the narcs temperamentally with their victims, we’re encouraged to accept the notion that, finally, there isn’t any difference between them. They’re no better than the people they’re busting, and, in fact, may be worse, since they don’t even play by their own laws.

Most drug movies are finger-pointing affairs where the good guys and the bad guys are easily recognizable and the moral is clearly in view beyond the haze of junkie smoke. “Rush” is certainly evenhanded--practically everybody we’re introduced to is implicated in some kind of corruption. But the best films about druggies, like for example, the 1971 “Born to Win,” with George Segal’s lacerating performance, or “Drugstore Cowboy,” have generally been the ones that took a principled, dispassionate look at the depravity. This dispassion is often mistaken for an endorsement of drug activity, but it’s actually something quite different. By not getting all moralistic, these films accept the idea that the people who are writhing onscreen in agony are variations of ourselves--only unluckier, more tortured, more addicted. When a movie about drugs turns its users into the “other,” it suffers a loss in human sympathy.

“Rush” (rated R for sensuality, language, violence and drug usage) isn’t on a level with the best films about drug usage because it never fully brings its people to life. When Jim first shows Kristen how to shoot heroin, it’s a scary moment, but as they both descend lower and lower their agonies become a dour spectacle. Their lives don’t have enough substance to make their horror resonate; we don’t see enough of Kristen and Jim before the fall. Jason Patric isn’t bad here, but once his character hits the skids we spend a lot of time watching him unravel; and he’s photographed like some kind of sainted hippie martyr--Jesus crossed with Jim Morrison.

The real saint of the piece is a two-bit pusher named Walker. As Max Perlich plays him, Walker is as goofy as a pint-sized Huntz Hall. When he is coerced into becoming an informer, his desperation begins to crowd out his spunk. Perlich, who was also in “Drugstore Cowboy,” has the right, free-form intuitions to play this role. Walker’s descent is the most moving thing in the film because, unlike the scenes involving Jim, his passage isn’t marked with cautionary road signs. He slips away before our eyes, and we only register the magnitude of what has happened to him when he’s gone.

If we had responded to Kristen and Jim with the same fierce empathy as we do to Walker, this film might have shaken us to the core. But for the most part it stands outside its horrors. It’s a straightforward view of a zigzag world.

‘Rush’

Jason Patric: Jim

Jennifer Jason: Leigh Kristen

Sam Elliott: Dodd

Max Perlich: Walker

A Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer release of a Zanuck Co. production. Director Lili Fini Zanuck. Producer Richard D. Zanuck. Screenplay Pete Dexter, based on the novel by Kim Wozencraft. Cinematographer Kenneth MacMillan. Editor Mark Warner. Costumes Colleen Atwood. Music Eric Clapton. Production design Paul Sylbert. Sound Hank Garfield. Running time: 2 hours.

MPAA-rated R (for sensuality, language, violence and drug usage).