Being Flynn (2012)

An excellent film based on the true story “Another Bullshit Night in Suck City” by Nick Flynn! Very well written and one of De Niro’s best roles and performances in years. Paul Dano, Julianne Moore and Olivia Thirlby were all at the top of their game as well.

There are many great quotes in the movie but below are some of my favorite from the book.

• Who doesn’t want to just disappear, at some point in the day, in a year, to just step off the map and float?
• Alcohol is the river we sit on the banks of, contemplating. Sometimes we watch ourselves float past, sometimes we watch ourselves sink..
• We got him to talk to a psych doctor once, the doctor asked if he heard things other people don’t. Sure, Paul answered, I hear birds in the morning when everyone’s sleeping, I hear trees rustling when no one’s around.
• Some mornings you wake up fully in your body, and you know this is all there is—the air, the shape your body makes in the air, your hand, the skin that covers your hand, the air that covers your skin, the light that fills the air, a few colors in the light, this one thought, this dream dissolving—it is a dream that, in your half-awake state, embarrasses you. You don’t tell it to the woman waking up beside you, the woman you love, because it is about another woman, whom you might also love. This is the dream you need to hold onto, this is your shadow speaking, attempting to bewilder you again. Sometimes, if you lay still, you can feel the air entering each cell, sometimes you can feel the blood in your lips. Sometimes, if you lay very still, you can feel the whole web tremble.
• Sometimes I’d see my father, walking past my building on his way to another nowhere. I could have given him a key, offered a piece of my floor. A futon. A bed. But I never did. If I let him inside I would become him, the line between us would blur, my own slow-motion car wreck would speed up. The slogan on the side of a moving company truck read TOGETHER WE ARE GOING PLACES—modified by a vandal or a disgruntled employee to read TOGETHER WE ARE GOING DOWN. If I went to the drowning man the drowning man would pull me under. I couldn’t be his life raft.

The last quote is especially poignant for me because I too have experienced similar moments involving the relationship with my own alcoholic father. In light of my own overindulgence with the attractively packaged poison known as alcohol over the years, I too have feared that I would become my father.