James Woods has always had a nervy intensity. No wonder he stays so thin. He probably burns it all off in nervous energy. Funny how it never crossed my mind that some of that energy could be from drugs; that is, it never crossed my mind until I saw 1988’s The Boost.
Woods plays a deeply insecure guy who desperately wants to be a mover and shaker at the height of the wealth-obsessed 80’s. We first see him in Manhattan, where he is whining about never getting a fair shake and not getting any leads. He’s makes Jack Lemmon in Glengarry Glen Ross seem like the most confident man on Earth in comparison. He feels this way despite being married to Sean Young. He keeps asking people if they can believe she’s with a guy like him.
Steven Hill gives Woods an offer to sell real estate in Los Angeles after Woods flop sweats his way through a job interview. Woods was being interviewed as salesperson for a new shopping mall, where he tells guys sitting around a boardroom table the property is too bland to succeed. “People struggle with smallness all their lives. Let them identify with something big.” Um, read the room, guy. And this convinces Hill to pay for Woods to move to the opposite coast to work for him?
Woods thrives in Los Angeles though, admittedly, the properties basically sell themselves, as buyers look to exploit a tax loophole involving real estate. Everything will do a 180 once the feds close that loophole. Hill advises Woods to take it easy for a while until they work out a new angle. But Woods is a guy entirely defined by his work: “Every time I sell something, it’s like somebody believes in me.”
One customer who had bought property from Woods pays in cash, explaining his line of work is “leisure activites”. And, yet, Woods had yet to succumb to trying cocaine, which seems so prevalent in his surroundings that it might as well be floating in the air.
Woods develops a taste for it after a friend (John Kapelos) encourages him to try some powdered confidence while at the first party since the real estate market collapsed: “Faith may move mountains. This stuff makes them fly.” That party is interesting, as all conversation comes to an abrupt halt as soon as Woods and Young appear. Like the song says, nobody loves you when you’re down and out. It is almost like failure is a contagious disease and others are worried they’ll contract it.
Before long, his spiraling debt and rampant drug use lead to him betraying Hill, forcing the older man to exile Woods. Hill completely exits the picture at this point and, honestly, it never quite regains its footing afterward. I always liked his character on Law & Order, and he really is only the slightest variation on that role in this film.
We’re only a third of the way through the runtime and it has already gone through an entire movie’s worth of material. Unfortunately, it will shift down several gears, making the remaining hour seem to take much longer to play out than possible.
After bad coke sends Woods to the hospital, the couple relocates to Santa Cruz, where they dry out and work menial jobs. Then he unwisely gets Kapelos and his girlfriend to come down for a visit, leading to the pregnant Young doing a few lines. As soon as we see her at the top of a staircase, we know she’s going to fall down it and miscarry.
Apparently not being depressed enough already, Woods changes his drug of choices to ludes: “Down—that where I want to go.” And that will be his destination. Not sure what his thinking is, but it seems to be akin to somebody believing they can’t get out of a hole because they haven’t dug deep enough yet.
I’m not going to reveal more about the plot, not out of fear of revealing spoilers, but because it is just a downward spiral until the credits roll. Instead, there were a couple of surprising cameos I wanted to point out. Grace Zabriskie, who would go on to be Laura Palmer’s mom on Twin Peaks, has an unusual bit that could have been excised where she is nothing more than the person with whom Woods leaves a dog he had found on the beach. A bigger surprise to me was Suzanne Kent in a similarly brief bit. I remember this actress best from being Mrs. Rene on Pee Wee’s Playhouse.
I liked these, and other, supporting actors more than Woods or Young. It’s odd that I can’t fault anything specific in their performances, except they both feel a bit too “actorly”. This is especially true in their scenes together, where I believed each of them, but somehow not in their interactions with each other. It’s like they’re acting at each other. And that’s a shame since both completely throw themselves into their performances. Hell, Young even throws herself down a flight of stairs.
It wasn’t like I was a financial wizard rolling in money and cocaine in the late 80’s, but The Boost captures a certain type of greed that it seemed everybody was aspiring to (or, at least, envied) at that time. This is predominately in the first third of the film, and I would have preferred an entire feature of just what is covered there. I’m sure the drug spiral that occupies the remainder of the time is honest, but it simply wasn’t a trip I was interested in taking, so to speak.
Dir: Harold Becker
Starring James Woods, Sean Young, John Kapelos, Steven Hill
Watched on Olive Films blu-ray