Review of The Lost Weekend

I followed the line of good reviews and a high IMDb rating to this flick and feel I've been misled by the readership here. This story about one alcoholic's weekend binge merits a few props as it touches on the psychology of an ambitious would-be writer who never was. However, the core of this character study is marred fatally by overwrought dialogue, half-baked character development, a bland story arc, and a melodramatic Theramin-saturated score that would have fit more comfortably in a sci-fi shocker about nuclear swamp mutants than a closely studied psychological drama. The film shines most as the protagonist's brother, played subtly and richly by Phillip Terry, appears alternately as a care-taker either fed up and through with it all or empathetic enough to lie valiantly in order to cover up his brother's shame. Unfortunately, this performance gets little screen time. For the most part we are forced to trudge through a miserable weekend with our protagonist as if it were a rote lesson in "Alcoholism and its Downward Spiral 101." To cap it all off, we get in the end a reversal as facile, unconvincing, and dissatisfying as Tofurkey for a Thanksgiving dinner.