I bet if I were to poll a small group of people, and ask them to list 5 or so Ben Stiller films, Permanent Midnight would probably not be on many of those lists. It does not follow the usual mildly amusing, wafer thin plot, same character in every film formula that Stiller employs. He plays a heroin addict.
Ben Stiller plays Jerry Stahl, a real person, who wrote the book Permanent Midnight, a memoir of his descent in to and climb out of heroin addiction. This film is of course, based on that book. Stahl has written for the television shows Alf, Twin Peaks, Northern Exposure, Moonlighting and CSI among others. In fact, he wrote the 100th episode of CSI, which is apparently is regarded as one of the best episodes of that series. He also wrote the screenplay for Bad Boys II. The time period of this film takes place when he was working on Alf and Twin Peaks. That being said, the film is a glimpse in to that part of his life, in which at some point he has a $6000 a week habit. Yes, thousand.
On the whole, the film is pretty passable. I mean, I kind of hate pointing out flaws in movies that are like this; true stories of human suffering. I am going to do it anyway, but I get that this a personal story that someone needed to tell. While I can respect that, I feel like it was a film that wasn’t terrific, but just good enough to make you understand that heroin destroys lives. In that respect, it doesn’t really distinguish itself from the myriad of other films of this subject matter. Right off the top of my head, The Basketball Diaries, a film about the once heroin addicted (and now recently deceased) writer Jim Carroll, did a better job of getting the point across, but making a decent film from an aesthetic standpoint. A large part of Midnight is told in flashback; Jerry and Kitty (Maria Bello) are in a hotel room and he is telling her of his exploits in a weirdly forced exposition dialogue sort of way. Time skips around a lot in his flashbacks so there really isn’t a good illustration of his journey to his bottom. In fact, where other films would focus on his despair or consequences of his actions, Midnight merely mentions them and moves on. There really is only one part of the film that I can describe as disturbing, and that is when he takes his infant daughter with him on a drug run and shoots heroin in to his neck right in front of her. If I can only find one disturbing scene in a movie about heroin, there is something wrong. The problem is that the movie has no depth. For example, for the amount of time Kitty is in the movie, I should have established some kind of connection with her. I did not. In fact, later in the film when she is crying, I couldn’t care less. There are some really obvious errors as well. When Jerry (the character) is at the methadone clinic, the doctor (played by the real Jerry) asks a question from a form and checks off the answer that Jerry gives him, but the question on the form is completely different than the one that was asked. Also, Kitty writes Jerry a letter, and there is a voice over of the letter. In the voice over, we hear Kitty say, “See you later,” as the camera slowly pulls away from the letter. That phrase is nowhere in the letter. Stiller’s performance was actually really good, but none of the other characters (again) had any real depth, so there were no other standouts. The cast also includes Elizabeth Hurley, Fred Willard, Owen Wilson, and Janeane Garofalo.
This film is worth a viewing just to see Ben Stiller in this role, and actually doing a good job. You can definitely find better films of this type, but it is not without it’s merits.
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