Drugstore Cowboy
by Gus Van Sant
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Eric Hull, Heather Graham, James LeGros, Kelly Lynch, Matt DillonDirector: Gus Van Sant
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo; English (Subtitled)
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: Anamorphic Widescreen, 1.85:1
Running Time: 104 minutes
DVD Release Date: 1999-10-26
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Lions Gate
Movie Reviews of Drugstore Cowboy
Movie Review: Drug addiction is social addiction
Summary: 5 Stars
One gets addicted to drugs, for sure, but that is only a small part of the business. This film tries to show how the addiction is an attitude, a social behavior, an act of belonging to a group, a community, a social class nearly, but not that far away from it. Here the dependence is threefold. First the girlfriend who is determined to stay addicted because her addiction is moderate enough to be controlled. Then the boyfriend and his own girlfriend and this time there is some status question here and to go on is to belong to a certain level of humanity, a certain level of masculinity. And then there is the wider community of the junkies, dealers and other characters in that farcical, yes farcical, melodrama. Then there are various events that make that addiction stick. The solidarity with the girlfriend with whom he was arrested, busted and jailed. He owes her to go on. Then the boyfriend who is the guarantee that he is normal, a normal male, a real male, a male in one word full stop and period. The cops are chasing them, and bad events happen. The boyfriend's girlfriend dies of an overdose one night in total solitude, while a burglary attempt in the pharmacy of a hospital fails pitifully and pathetically, and they have to get rid of the body and bury her in some woods. That makes you stick to your addiction, to your group. And yet, out of boredom and tiredness, and since one of the group has stepped out and down, he decides to do the same and get out of the hassle it has all become. And then you find out very easily how the wider social group is catching upon him. Two of his old acquaintances, now he is isolated, try to get his stash of drugs, since they are convinced he has one, they refuse to believe he has quitted, and then since they are getting nothing and nowhere they decide to shoot him dead, which they fail doing because they know nothing about using fire-arms. And there we are in the ambulance taking him away. Will he tell who attacked him or not? Will he go back to that world and that habit? We cannot know and say right away, right now. But one thing is sure. If he goes back it would not be for the physiological habit, but for the social and maybe emotional habit. Drug addiction is first of all in the mind and in the social behavior of the addict, not in his physiological parameters.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
Summary of Drugstore Cowboy
Gus Van Sant made his name with this offbeat story of a small group of drug addicts who heist pharmacies to feed their habit. Matt Dillon completely broke with his juvenile persona as Bob, the grungy ringleader and jittery mastermind of a junkie crew. With his frustrated wife Dianne (Kelly Lynch), his loyal partner, the easygoing Rick (James Le Gros), and Rick's juvenile girlfriend Nadine (Heather Graham in an early role), Bob plots ingenious heists and spends the rest of his days sitting around the house getting high. When the heat becomes too intense in Portland, the quartet hits the road for small-town drug stores and hospitals, but when their luck runs out it does so in grand fashion. Set in the Pacific Northwest of 1971, Van Sant so effortlessly re-creates the period that you'd think the film was a time capsule--except for the attitude. Van Sant refuses to moralize and lines his sympathies behind his characters. They're no heroes, but Van Sant can't cast them as villains either. His low-key direction concentrates on the flavor of day-to-day life for a crew of junkies living from fix to fix. Even his drug imagery is inventively placid, a dreamy set of floating visions that suggests their own disembodied states. James Remar costars as the dogged police detective Gentry and cult author William S. Burroughs makes a memorable appearance as the aging junkie Tom the Priest. --Sean AxmakerDrama DVD Video
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