If tackling a subject like alcoholism is hard in a feature-length film, it’s exponentially harder in a short. Sounds contradictory, but it’s not. The more time you have to tell a story, the easier it is to show nuance. To find different ways to approach a subject. To engage the audience. And yet Marcellus Cox’s Liquor Bank is a clear-eyed, emotional, and affecting look at not just the ways alcoholism affects a person, but the way it impacts the people around them, and shapes every relationship.
Alcoholism isn’t an easy subject. Too often, the reality of addiction is dramatized in a way that feels over the top and yet unearned. Cox, however, understands that it’s not just about the lows—which are many, and need to be shown—but about the underlying desire for human connection that, so often, is at the root of the problem. And without understanding the issue, it’s impossible to tell a good story.
But Liquor Bank doesn’t pretend to have all the answers. If anything, it provides a blueprint, a way forward, and a story that feels realistic in its approach, without pretending their way of presenting alcoholism is the only valid one. This isn’t just about the fact that the short is based on a true story, which perhaps helps, but about the fact that the filmmaker seems to really understand the story he wants to tell—and how to connect with his audience.
The short is elevated not just by a great foundation, and a degree of empathy that should be the norm for any project dealing with addiction, but that often feels like too much to ask, but by actors who settle into the characters perfectly.
Eddie (Antwone Barnes) is a lonely ex-Marine cooped up in his house who misses his 1-year sobriety party at his AA meeting due to being drunk. Baker (Sean Alexander James), meanwhile, is the group leader who comes to check on Eddie and becomes his link to not just his humanity, but the possibility that one setback isn’t the end of the journey. It’s just that. A setback.
That the short manages to send this message so clearly and convincingly with just these two characters in such a small space is a testament to the filmmaker’s clarity of purpose and to two actors who give it their all, at every second.
For anyone who has some experience with the highs and lows of alcoholism, Liquor Bank is a great watch, grounded in empathy and offering a light at the end of the tunnel without ever discounting that this is a serious subject that must be treated with the utmost respect.
