The Panic in Needle Park (1971) - screenplay by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne
The star-crossed tourniquet romance of the seventies, featuring an impish ‘pre-Michael Corleone’ Al Pacino and Kitty Winn’s fiendish vanity-void. Narrative filmmaking’s inherent artifice limits the amount of grit that can seep through onto the screen. Absent a single musical note throughout the movie, the sounds of bubbling syringes and granulated heroin being finger-flicked out of wax paper envelopes create a diegetic rhythm.
Joan Didion’s self-possessed journalism is brutally elegant. Her writing maintains a compunction-free empathy toward its subjects, as she pierces through projections to find their nascent source. Didion prevents these characters from devolving into smack-addled caricatures of addiction and desperation. Their devotion sustains visceral bouts of scoring, hooking, overdosing, cheating, theft, incarceration, and the most horrific scene involving a dog that I’ve ever seen (seriously, it was more unbearable than Umberto D.). We may cringe at their depraved behavior, but we still empathize with the loyalty we know is pulsating through their tormented veins.
It’s on Instant Netflix — watch it.
