Sam's Blog - Better Living Through Chemistry

Better Living Through Chemistry is exactly what you'd expect: it's a safe, lighthearted film about a pharmacist whose miserable suburban life, complete with crazy wife and son, is flipped on its head when he begins cavorting with a rich married woman and abusing the privileges of his pharmacy to do drugs. Doug Varney (Sam Rockwell) is stuck with an intimidating, exercise-crazy wife (Michele Monaghan) whose father has taken over his pharmacy, and a rebellious son. When his unreliable delivery man flakes out, Doug has to do the prescription deliveries himself, in the process meeting Elizabeth (Olivia Wilde), a using, hoity toity wife of a rich man who immediately takes a liking to Doug. The two begin a relationship filled with sex, drugs, and criminal activity. While the film boasts of a great cast, their performances are a little overrun by the softened, unrealistic feel of the story.

The sequence of events start off a little wobbly (the young, beautiful, high class woman would of course set her sights on a middle-aged doormat of a pharmacist, right? I expected there to be a catch here, but there wasn't), and it keeps getting wobblier from there, as the first two acts basically sketch out a druggie's fantasies. Elizabeth convinces Doug to start concocting his own mixes at the pharmacy (so says the unnecessary voiceover by Jane Fonda), and soon he becomes more confident and lively through the aid of his self-medication. He even kickstarts his life of crime, having a bonding moment with his son over a broken sign and windows, and scheming to break Elizabeth free from her marriage via widowing.

It is not until an officer of the DEA starts snooping around that Doug even remotely begins to panic. However, where your average dark comedy would now allow the protagonist's antics to catch up to him, the third act has Doug getting off pretty easy -- though the whirlwind of events that got him off the hook were pretty clever -- and we're left wondering "what if".

There is, however, still something to be said about the lighthearted tone of the film. Sure, the first two acts have a lot of face palming moments, but by the time the third act hits, you start to enjoy yourself. The key is to view the film through the lens of fun, because that's exactly what this film is aiming for; there don't seem to be any underlying messages: it is simply a story about a guy who wants out of his current life.

Now playing at the Midtown Cinema!