The subtlety of alcohol addiction: Dramatic treatments
Photo from IMDB
The subtlety of alcohol addiction: Dramatic treatments
March 4, 2026
Note: Minor spoilers here for movies Father Mother Sister Brother, Babylon 5 TV series, and
Last week I had the opportunity to finally see Jim Jarmusch's latest movie, FMSB, now that it's streaming. It is excellent. It's a collection of three stories. I ended up watching it twice in order to confirm something I thought I had seen in the Father story, especially after seeing all three stories. As with other Jarmusch movies, so much of what's good about them is in what isn't spoken about.
Spoilers start here!
Each of the stories deals with those things that families just don't talk about, and in each one more than one person was harbouring something unspoken. In the Father story I had a pretty strong suspicion, and on rewatch I found what I had missed to confirm that the son, played by Adam Driver, is dealing with alcoholism. (Watch with headphones if you're streaming, and you'll hear the hint before he gets out of the car, when his sister isn't looking.) And his father and sister know, because even though he brought booze (for his dad), father and sister ensure that everyone has a glass of water or cup of tea and assure the son that yes, you can toast with those just fine. Nobody says anything about it directly. It's pretty clear that the sister, played by Mayim Bialik, isn't fooled by the doddy-old-dad act and her brother still is, and she can't seem to tell him directly either. It's very true to life, in the way that Jim Jarmusch does so beautifully.
And that got me thinking, there are quite a few excellent "treatments" of alcohol addiction in media that I have appreciated as someone who works in the mental health space.
If you're old enough you saw When a Man Loves a Woman when it was new, starting the hottest actors at the time, Andy Garcia and Meg Ryan. Ryan's character has a successful career, and an alcoholism problem. It was a big deal, because in the late 80s and early 90s alcohol misuse was still tolerated in men, and it was a big deal to portray a woman with alcoholism, also a woman with a professional career. It's been a long time since I saw it, but I remember thinking as a teenager that the marriage relationship in the film must be exceptional to get through that. Now married for 20+ years I have a better understanding of how marriages survive hard times.
In the sci-fi TV show Babylon 5, which ran for 4+1 spectacular seasons (why 4+1? 5 seasons' worth of planned storytelling was crunched into 4, then they got a bonus year), addressed alcohol addiction through one of the show's most endearing characters, chief of security Michael Garibaldi. He's very much a New York City cop, in charge of keeping the peace in a similarly diverse setting: the space station. It's a stressful job, and throughout the first 4 seasons we see Garibaldi make a point of drinking anything but alcohol, he talks about his history frankly.
In the last season, Garibaldi is fired for bad behaviour that is tied into the fact thaylt he has started drinking heavily again. The station chief of medicine (who is struggling with a stimulant addiction) tries to talk to him. I think I remember other major characters with whom he was on reasonably good terms have talks with him at some point, but if I recall correctly as happens in real life nobody gets through to him, and he does not find a reason on his own to be sober until he goes back to Mars. I don't think it's clear that he remains sober either, it's ambiguous. The saddest part of this is that life imitated the art: actor Jerry Doyle, who played Garibaldi, had struggled with alcohol before the show, and must have gone back to it because he died of alcohol-related health issues some time after the show.
If you Google for it you can find lots of other examples of both film and TV that have addressed alcoholism in one way or another. I remember reading that humans have been producing alcohol since at least the time we began farming, maybe before, so alcoholism has probably been with us for thousands of years. Overconsumption of alcohol is tolerated around the world still and it isn't unusual that, like in Father Mother Sister Brother, friends and family just don't know how to approach the issue.
#jimjarmusch #fathermothersisterbrother #adamdriver #megryan #babylon5
Comments