This film is to Leaving Las Vegas as The Howling is to Little Red Riding Hood. Under The Volcano is the most grindingly real portrayal of the true devastation of alcoholism ever put on film (I've seen them all from Lost Weekend forward). This is no romantic movie where a guy decides he will go to Vegas and drink himself to death in 6 weeks then meets a devastatingly gorgeous chick who takes care of him the rest of the way. In this film the real horrors of alcohol are convincingly portrayed as the main character loses all track of reality and cannot tell whether his wife is really her or a hallucination. And because of that intermittent fading out and in, he loses the one chance he might have had at redemption. There is no romance here. There is no fabulous girl to have sex with while he's dying. This guy lives in a world so much more terrifying than Nic Cage's world in LLV as to be about two entirely different human experiences.
Not everyone will be able to stand this. It's almost unremittingly awful. But for anyone who is an alcoholic, recovering or otherwise, or who has lived under its shadow as someone related to or in love with an alcoholic, this is textbook stuff. Malcolm Lowery was an alcoholic and died of the disease. He put all he had into this book. No punches are pulled. The benchmark of the genre.
Not everyone will be able to stand this. It's almost unremittingly awful. But for anyone who is an alcoholic, recovering or otherwise, or who has lived under its shadow as someone related to or in love with an alcoholic, this is textbook stuff. Malcolm Lowery was an alcoholic and died of the disease. He put all he had into this book. No punches are pulled. The benchmark of the genre.