INSTEP Magzine

My Zinc Bed sees human compulsions and weaknesses and the inability to not walk away in the strangest of ways. That is one out of the many themes this film delves into without being moralistic. It has nothing to do with morals but the sense of self each individual carries with him. The ability to spot deformities and the unsettling inability and lack of will that ties us down. That in a nutshell is My Zinc Bed.
It is about addictions and walking the thin line between giving in to the temptation and struggling to fight back. The emotions are so raw and naked that they are haunting and truly intimate. Anthony Page has picked a very relevant script for adaptation. It doesn't make you smile and it doesn't make you cry either. It just questions. Are we all hooked to something?

Paul Peplow (Paddy Considine), a writer and a flat broke poet is an alcoholic. He knows it and this makes him an outsider in the world around him. His aim "is to get through the day". No human contact, no job, just freelance projects, enough to get him by and maybe he will survive this life.

As Paul says narrates in the film:
"In my own life, nothing that has happened, nothing that can happen, compares with the strangeness of a single summer."

One summer turn his live upside down.
Paul's hopelessness comes into full blast when he lands at a lunch with Victor Quinn (Jonathan Pryce), a shrewd, calculating businessman. But Victor knows more about Paul than most interviewees should. He quotes Paul's poetry to him, entire verses literally and already knows that Paul is not only an alcoholic but his ability to make it to just another day is via Alcoholic Anonymous (AA) meetings. And herein lays the debate, the tension and the addiction.

Victor's obsession with meetings and his disdain for its effectiveness stems from more than just mere curiosity. His desperation to understand appears because of his own life. It affects him because of the beautiful, fragile and broken Elsa (Uma Thurman) who is Victor's wife. He picks her off the floor in a bar when she is whacked out on various intoxicants and hits rock bottom. Her addiction, cocaine and booze. Victor enters as the saviour and the two get hitched.

It has been years since they married but the chewing inside their hearts haunts them both.
With Paul Peplow, those hidden emotions break out and spin out of control.

Paul intrigues Victor. And he plays Paul like a pawn in a chess game. Paul's demeanour reflects a deeper nature of Elsa. In one scene with Paul, she says: "I'm not a stranger to self-hatred". This despite being she is supposedly cured.

Victor deals the cards and sees who takes the house. Pure and simple. Victor dances in paradoxes and is often clinical when he speaks of his wife, Elsa, as a "friend".

In one scene as Victor makes that perfect Margarita, it tortures Paul and it is gut wrenching. In another, the first solo meeting between Elsa and Paul bring out their demons to the forefront and it's confrontation time. It makes for a heartbreaking scene.