It is often said that hanging out with drunk people is unbearable when you’re sober. Drunkenness is a different state of being: it permits things that the real world does not. Partially due to lessened inhibition, partially due to the enticing promise of forgetting, some things feel more possible. You want to talk to strangers about your biggest regrets; to tell bawdy, unpractised jokes; to speak in a way that is lyrical, outside of yourself.
Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets is a remarkable film. It succeeds where most other non-fiction doesn’t, feeling absolutely dedicated to its premise and yet, also far-reaching, deeply emotional, and provocative. Documenting the last day (and night) of a Vegas dive bar, it puts a second sobering lens on a disparate yet strangely close-knit group of bar-goers: that of the camera. Really though, it is about alcohol and those who use and abuse it.
Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross shoot with stunning, occasionally dreadful intimacy. We begin in the morning of a long, meandering day. A patron, Michael, is waking up at the bar. Out of an ensemble of fascinating people, he is perhaps the centre, the voice who guides us through the affectations and illusions of everyone else. Early on he says to the owner that he is proud because he ruined his life while sober. Only then did he come to them.
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Amongst the unfunny jokes, strange philosophical musings, and macho pretensions of others, he is a man who tells it as it is. He is also a complex, regretful, and occasionally angry person; a former actor who is now stuck in a cycle of work and drinking. In one particularly harsh moment, a man tells him that he loves him and that the people at the “Roaring 20s” bar are like family. ‘I am someone you hang out with at the bar,’ he replies. ‘I am not your family.’
Considering the tendency of intoxicated people to somewhat obscure the truth, it is a great triumph that the movie feels so honest and revelatory. Drunkenness overwhelms and yet subsides as a theme; we are not sober observers but participants. The Ross brothers’ open-minded perspective is rewarded by stark confessions and warm displays of solidarity and friendship. These are two poles that intersect always, the patron’s dreams and anxieties becoming our own.
Emphasised by the elegiac framing of the bar closing, concerns such as the treatment of war veterans, the climate crisis, finding love, grieving, and the generation gap are explored. It becomes about everything and nothing. If inebriation is a mask, then Bloody Nose demonstrates Oscar Wilde’s wisdom to be correct: give someone a mask and they will tell you the truth.
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Our cast of masked heroes include the calm, guitar-strumming owner; a bartending mother who worries about her misbehaving son; an old chilled out man who has lost his wife; and the veterans of two wars, divided by age and perspective. Fights happen in bars – more often than most places, even – yet they are also where lives intersect. Everyone talks to each other. They relinquish prejudices, they find new joys that they are bound to forget.
All this is cleverly punctuated by inter-titles – small snippets of elegant alcoholic wisdom that, when isolated, are achingly true. Much of the unobtrusive documentary-work here is about ways of seeing. In one moment, someone’s ramblings are juxtaposed with a focus on a man yelling at him to shut up. What does it mean when you can see through the lies – the film seems to ask – when the two poles of self-denying abandon and joyous comradeship are tipped out of balance?
In this environment, even caring can be a kind of emptiness, an absence. If anything unites these disparate lives it is the wish to progress past where they are now. Subsequently, the greatest moments of love and happiness are imbued with sadness and dissatisfaction. Maybe the recognition of this is what makes this work stand out. Each glance or solemn confession shows the world through these eyes, the eyes of someone who is asleep and yet awake. Painfully drunk and painfully sober. There is nothing inexpressive or irrelevant.
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Other perspectives and images intensify this bittersweet tone. A TV in the corner of the neon-lit room plays old black-and-white movies. One, I suspect, is the Titanic docudrama A Night to Remember. Retrospectively, this usage could act as a wry commentary on the apocalyptic mood that the inhabitants greet the bar’s closure with. It could just have been the creators correctly predicting that their work would echo this title.
News broadcasts too echo and suggest things unsaid, provoking and derailing conversations. The jukebox blares out popular hits and songs dedicated to friends. Mad, tired eyes pick fights or new conquests, things that would be different anywhere else. Seldom has such a poignant, beautiful encapsulation of our loves and fears felt so natural, like being in a bar with strangers.