Smashed

Directed by James Ponsoldt

(R)

***

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If this addiction drama is remembered in a few years, it will be for one “astounding” performance, said Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out New York. Playing an alcoholic schoolteacher who’s trying to sober up, the underrated Mary Elizabeth Winstead is “never less than excellent”—“grandly unhinged” when required to be, but remarkable mostly for her self-control. The story is “primarily about commitment”—both to sobriety and to a marriage, said Claudia Puig in USA Today. Winstead’s Kate is married to a hard-partying dilettante (Aaron Paul), and her desire to dry out thus generates a “clear-eyed” study of “what happens when one half of a couple decides to change and the other does not.” One sitcom-style subplot feels badly out of place—Kate’s attempt to fake a pregnancy in order to get around having vomited in front of a classroom of first-graders, said Scott Tobias in NPR.org. “Still, there’s a modesty to Smashed that’s ultimately winning.” By staying focused on a single chapter in the life of one woman, it effectively illuminates the ways that the recovery process “can leave its own kind of wreckage.”