‘Smashed’ tackles highs and lows of boozing young schoolteacher

TORONTO – There are plenty of bad drunks on the big screen and actress Mary Elizabeth Winstead says she was determined to not be one of them.

The affable brunette plays a schoolteacher whose drinking spirals out of control in the indie drama “Smashed” and admits that the danger of slipping into mawkish slurred speech, a comical stagger or an awkward cross-eyed stare was big.

“It’s a fine line,” Winstead says of what separates a believable addict from an over-the-top lush.

“It’s a scary thing because you don’t want to over act. And for me I haven’t been drunk that many times. I like to drink (and) socialize but I’m like a one- to two-drink type of person. So it’s not something that comes really naturally to me, like, ‘Oh, I know exactly what this feels like’ and I can snap into it. It took some working, definitely.”

Before filming began, Winstead spent more than a month researching addiction and discussing the demands of the role with writer-director James Ponsoldt. She says that included going to open Alcoholics Anonymous meetings with co-writer and recovering alcoholic Susan Burke.

Ponsoldt, whose first film “Off the Black” featured Nick Nolte as an aging alcoholic, says getting the details right was crucial.

“There’s some great screen performances of drug addicts or alcoholics and some really bad ones and there’s very little in between,” says Ponsoldt, who strove to craft an “epic, sad, clown” but also someone “human and vulnerable.”

“Sometimes you see a performance that seems a little stylized, a little affected and you don’t buy it. When it feels real (it’s) like it’s almost invisible, like a Daniel Day-Lewis performance, like there’s so much physicality to it … or like Ratso Rizzo — Dustin Hoffman in ‘Midnight Cowboy.’ “

Winstead’s Kate is generally known as the “cute drunk girl” at parties but now that she’s getting older, her alcohol-fuelled antics are more sad than fun.

It gets so bad her drinking starts to affect the classroom, and a frightening bender leads to lie upon lie to conceal her growing problem.

Megan Mullally puts in a rare serious turn as a well-meaning school principal, while Mullally’s real-life husband and “Parks and Recreation” star Nick Offerman plays a fellow teacher who sees through Kate’s tall tales.

Ponsoldt says the idea for the story emerged in a conversation with Burke about stupid things they had done when they were loaded. That led to brainstorming ideas for a script about an ordinary woman with familiar problems.

“We knew we didn’t want to make a ‘scared straight’ story, you know, a message movie,” says Ponsoldt, who’s in his mid-30s.

“We knew that we wanted the main characters to be our age, that were very relatable. We knew that it needed to be alcohol and not about heroin or meth. We wanted it to be something that was very universal and relatable and we knew that we wanted to have a female protagonist who really could be just dynamic and sort of funny and vulnerable and when she’s drunk she can also be really cruel and immature.”

Complicating things for Kate is her loving but similarly troubled husband Charlie, played by “Breaking Bad” star Aaron Paul. Her growing desire to clean up her life puts unexpected strain on their marriage.

“It’s so co-dependent and toxic and there’s just no way for it to work,” Winstead said during a round of interviews at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.

“It’s sort of a sad relationship in that way but it’s triumphant at the same time because you kind of have hope for Charlie … that maybe he’s going to figure it out himself at some point, too.”

Paul is best known as a conscience-riddled drug addict and meth cook on the AMC drama, but Winstead says he reveals a much different side in “Smashed” as a happy-go-lucky guy who loves to get wasted.

“He really brought so much subtlety to it and we had a great time doing the drunk scenes together,” she says.

“We would just basically wrestle and in between scenes we would try to keep it going because if you stop you come out of it and then you don’t feel drunk anymore. So we would just be running around, acting like seven-year-olds playing and spinning and just trying to kind of stay in our really silly drunken state.”

Meanwhile, Ponsoldt says he turned to acting guru Ivana Chubbuck for more calculated methods to help his actors. She passed on a detailed exercise that is meant to help anyone replicate various types of highs, including those for cocaine, heroin and alcohol.

Ponsoldt says the same techniques were used by Oscar-winner Halle Berry of “Monster’s Ball” and Oscar-nominated actress Elisabeth Shue of “Leaving Las Vegas.”

“(It) seems almost like hypnosis but it sort of triggers a physiological response of feeling kind of drunk,” Ponsoldt says of the drill, which consists of talking an actor through each sensation of savouring and swallowing an imagined drink.

Meanwhile, Oscar-winning actress Octavia Spencer lends heavyweight star power as a recovering alcoholic who bonds with Kate.

Spencer says “Smashed” was the first job she was offered after filming her award-winning turn in “The Help” and she was drawn to Ponsoldt’s intimate, measured take on addiction.

“I loved the way he artfully sort of wove the levity into the narrative,” Spencer says. “I think people are more apt to hear the message if there’s a bit of humour with the pathos.”

Ponsoldt’s next film, “The Spectacular Now,” also touches on alcoholism — it’s based on the Tim Tharp novel about a hard-partying high school senior who realizes he has the power to help someone change their life.

Ponsoldt said he hopes “Smashed” — which won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival — can present an honest picture of what it’s like to struggle with addiction, including the full range of emotions that go along with it. When he attended AA meetings as part of his research he says he was struck by how much humour there was.

“It’s not a bunch of people sitting around crying in a group hug and feeling sorry for themselves. They’re some of the funniest, strangest stories you will ever hear followed by maybe the most heart-breaking story you’ve ever heard in your life,” he says.

“They’re also what we wanted the film to feel like — totally unpredictable and totally veering sometimes from absurd and funny and almost awkwardly funny… to something that’s kind of gut-wrenching.”

“Smashed” opens Friday in Toronto and Vancouver before heading to other Canadian cities.