Junkie’s Sonata-Your Innocent When You Dream-This Is
Not Johnny Milton’s Paradise Found- The
Film Adaptation From The Jesse Stone Series Of Robert Parker’s “Innocents Lost”
(2011)-A Short Made For Television Film Review
DVD Review
By Josh Breslin
Innocents Lost, starring Tom Selleck, 2011
The late crime novel
writer Robert B Parker, I think he liked to be called private detection writer
but I prefer crime novel and since it is my dime there you have it, was a
prophet, was man before his time in writing about the junkie wave that has
descended upon the land of late. (Called the opioid crisis in polite society
since this involves some of those polite society relatives but junkie wave is
more like it, more the way novelist Nelson Algren who wrote the definitive
novel on the subject The Man With The
Golden Arm would have put it.) I was looking for a film, having already
reviewed the film adaptation of Algren’s novel starring Frank Sinatra long
along, that would bring a more contemporary edge to the subject. I didn’t want
the sudden newspaper wave baloney detailing how the streets are not safe now
with junkies shooting the works in every corner scaring little children or
about some poor bastard being bopped on the head for his kale so some sullen
cretin could see his (or her as we will see here) fixer man to get well-for a
minute. So after some light scouting I found Innocents Lost and this is just the vehicle I need to do a modern
day screed on junkie-hood, the junkie sonata.
In the background of
this one is the profound notion that a cop will always be a cop and that is the
case with deposed police chief Jesse Stone who got bounced from his job for
reasons unknown is pouting about getting back in harness. (Unknown to me since I have not seen the
previous eight films I think already produced in this series.) Getting back in harness
in land’s end, in Paradise by the sea in some mythical Cape Ann locale if only
he can overcome whatever it was that got him the boot. One thing for sure there
was no heavy lifting on this job with crime and criminals staying far from this
upscale town-which is exactly the way the uppity town’s people liked it-what the
hell was Haverhill for anyway. (There were rumors that this Jesse Stone whose
previous experience before falling down in Paradise was as a coffee and donut
shop patrolman in La La land had put his name in for the vacant police
commissioner’s job in New York City. The search committee had a good laugh as
they tossed that one out on the first round. Everybody thought it was a joke
since nobody had ever heard of Paradise, or knew it never existed and were
hardly going to hire a stool-sore patrolman for their top gun.)
While Jesse broods (and
hard liquor drinks which may be the key to his getting kicked out of Paradise)
in splendid isolation as he watches the tide come in he gets the nod on a couple
of cases. Only one of which concerns us here, the junkie shoot-up case. (In the
other one white-bread Jesse helps a stumble-down Boston cop figure out that a
guy in a fatal hold-up was not the guy although that did the black suspect no
good since his “alibi” was that he had raped some helpless woman some blocks
away from the felony robbery. That is a Jesse resume builder for sure).
While Jesse was wiling
away the hours at the dingy Paradise police department offices he befriended a
young woman, a college student named Laura, don’t get tied up with names when
dealing with junkies especially those who have to hustle their asses in the street
to get their fixer man dough, who before spiraling downward had been picked for
DUI. This Laura was the daughter of a rich woman recently divorced from her
husband, presumably for adultery although it could have been plenty of other things,
who had zero concern for parenting or for her daughter. Laura as kids will took
it hard and started slippery-slope drinking which brought her fatefully foursquare
with Jesse. Jesse took her under his wing for a while but with his own drinking
problems, his divorce and the pressures of the cop job (are you kidding the heaviest
duty making the monthly quota for parking tickets) he lost track of her. Lost track
until she wound up down the road from that splendid isolation place he lived in
while plotting his comeback. Wound up dead from an overdose, from heroin, from
sister, from boy, from H, whatever you call it in your neighborhood. Except in
Jesse-less tourist trap Paradise they called it an accident by some stumblebum stranger
passing through.
The suddenly quasi-parental
Jesse gets on the case, stops drinking for a couple of days if I recall. This
Laura thing had to have been if not murder then not the official accident everybody
in Paradise had bought into, had wished into with a vengeance. So Jesse goes on
his own down and dirty investigation starting with that rehab mill she had gone
into for the drinking problem (and it really was, they were pushing them out
the minute the insurance stopped or Daddy Warbucks stops payments) over in
Haverhill run by a doctored who lived in Paradise. Through cashing in a few
favors, Jesse found out that this Laura had been busted for trafficking in
drugs and her ass. How did that happen taking a young college girl and turning her
into a junkie whore. Somebody was behind the whole thing, somebody had turned
her on to the drugs and her spiral downward.
Of course Jesse finds
the guy, a Russian guy naturally like this was still the Cold War who worked at
that rehab mill. This bastard’s MO was to work the rehab mills, knowing that orderly
help was hard to get for minimum wages. He would scout out the vulnerable ones,
girls, guys it didn’t matter, load them up with feel good drugs and then put them
on the street safe in the knowledge that he was connected with the right
mobsters. End of story. Well not quite Jesse traps the guy by luring him and his
next hustling girl to a hotel and humiliates him. Tough Russian guys though,
connected or not, are not about to let some ex-cop have the last laugh so he goes
after Jesse out there in Paradise splendor. Wrong move though in Jesse’s home
turf. KIA. That didn’t bring back that fallen Laura, didn’t seem to be a resume-builder,
didn’t do much to put a dent in society’s drug problems, didn’t stop his
brooding and plotting but did allow him to get that fresh whiskey bottle out
and pour a few fingers of the nectar. More later.
