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A well-crafted, hard-hitting look at an ideal marriage torn apart by personal insecurity, material greed and designer drugs. After years of frustration, Woods meets a sympathetic Californian businessman (Hill), who soon has him selling tax-shelter real estate investments as if his life depended on it. The market is wiped out overnight. Woods is left with no job and a lot of bills. He still has his beautiful wife (Young), but his fragile self-respect is shattered. Offered a little 'boost' by a pal, Woods snorts coke for the first time, instantly dispelling despair but also tapping into an already dangerously addictive personality. The addiction scenario is standard stuff: stress and temptation followed by steep decline, short-lived clean up, and final tragic lapse. The real fascination, though, is the sense that Woods is a disaster waiting to happen, a hollow man constantly on the verge of implosion. The approach here is slightly too monotone and distanced, curiously at odds with Woods' compulsively energetic performance.

“The Boost” is not simply about drugs. It is also about the hedonistic lifestyles of the 1980s, especially in go-go areas like the Los Angeles real estate market in which fortunes are won and squandered in a matter of months and there is unspeakable pressure to keep up appearances. The movie is a modern-day version of “Death of a Salesman,” with James Woods selling leveraged tax shelters. He’s out there on a smile, a shoeshine and a line of cocaine.

Woods is one of the most intense, unpredictable actors in the movies today. You watch his characters because they seem capable of exploding - not out of anger, but out of hurt, shame and low self-esteem. They’re wounded, but they fight back by being smarter than anyone else and using jokes and sarcasm to keep people at arm’s length.

That’s the case with Lenny, the guy he plays in this movie. He doesn’t care if you like him or not, just so long as you see that he has a big house, an expensive car and a wife so beautiful that - in his words - “How did she wind up with a runt like me?”

Gary Tooze

March 17th, 2016