Butler's Cinema Scene

Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Aaron Paul

“SMASHED” My rating: C+ (Opening Nov. 9 at the Cinemark Palace and Glenwood at Red Bridge)

85 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Kate Hannah loves her job as an elementary school teacher.  She connects with the kids. She’s energetic, happy, eager.

And drunk.

So drunk that she pukes in front of her first graders. So ashamed that she claims it was morning sickness. Now she has to endure the travesty of a baby shower from her fellow teachers.

“Smashed” is a sort of update of “The Days of Wine and Roses,” starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Kate and Aaron Paul (“Breaking Bad”) as her husband,  Charlie.

As rendered by writer/director James Ponsoldt (whose first feature was 2006’s “Off the Black” with Nick Nolte as an alcoholic…is there a trend here?), “Smashed” is solid but unspectacular. It really breaks no new ground — but then perhaps every generation needs its own addiction story.

Kate and Charlie are co-dependent and mutually enabling. They go out drinking every night, whether at a karaoke club or just your basic neighborhood bar. But when Kate wakes up one morning on an abandoned sofa beneath a highway overpass, reeking of alcohol and crack fumes, she decides it’s time for a change.

Nick Offerman

A fellow teacher (Nick Offerman, virtually unrecognizable as the right-leaning loony he plays on “Parks and Recreation”) takes her to an AA meeting. She finds a sponsor in Jenny (“The Help’s” Octavia Spencer).  She figures that her life will settle down once she gets straight.

If only it were that easy. The people in Kate’s life really don’t want her to change. Her mother (Mary Kay Place), a lush whose own husband got sober and left her, now warns Charlie that “They can change, you know.”

And Charlie must decide what he wants more. His wife or the bottle.

Winstead (“Scott Pilgrim vs. the World”) and Paul gives largely unforced performances, and Ponsoldt directs with an economy that doesn’t wear out its welcome. But the bottom line is that most of us have seen this one before.

| Robert W. Butler