One of Ferrara's best
This is one of Ferrara's best and most emotionally powerful films. Modine gives what must be his best performance, just totally raw and unhinged and vulnerable. The use of dissolves and layering of the images is fascinating and beautiful -- signifying a new phase in Ferrara's career, which extended to the even-better New Rose Hotel and the shamefully underseen 'R Xmas. You could say that here, the dissolve-heavy, dreamy aesthetic works the best with the film's content, but it is deployed wonderfully in all of these films.
Anyway, The Blackout, like Bad Lieutenant, is an incredibly, uncomfortably realistic depiction of addiction. Just the scene where Matty relapses, alone in that Miami hotel room, is right on the money: the way he brightens up and starts letting loose and acting like he's on top of the world (though he's really pathetic and alone, about to lose everything) after swigging two mini-vodkas is very true to life for any addict who returns to their substance after a period of abstinence.
Some amazing scenes throughout. I love Hopper's final rant. "Get out of my life! Get out of my memory, out of my mind, out of my life! OUT! OUT! OUT!" Hopper's sort of indulging in his old Frank Booth-isms in this film, but he still impresses, especially in this scene. Matty can't even respond, he's so wrapped up in his guilt and he knows that Hopper's indignation is right, anyway. From this point on, Blackout actually resembles the earlier more explicitly Catholic films Ferrara made with Nicholas St. John, as the sense of guilt and of one's sins coming back to haunt them is as powerful as ever in the end here. And about that end: shattering, inevitable, haunting, perfect. Never has the ocean appeared so ghostly and so unreal on film, in all its pure blackness. Rarely has the human soul been bared so thoroughly and truthfully as in this film, as well as many of Ferrara's others. A masterpiece. Thankfully it has at least a good Region 1 DVD in the correct aspect ratio; let's hope The Addiction and The Funeral, even greater works, get the same sometime soon.