One Pill Makes You Corporate: LIMITLESS (2011)

LIMITLESS, AKA AMERICAN PSYCHOPHARMACOLOGICAL, is kind of a fable about that drug so popular amongst investment bankers, Adderall, or failing that any amphetamine-based stimulant. The idea is that we only use 10% of our brain, what if we could use all of it? And have total recall of even the most mundane moments in memory. Such is the gift of the magic pill, which then he needs more of, and so do a lot of other people. The chase is on, paranoia steps up, all is well, but then loose ends are tied behind people's backs, and sheer stupidity rears its head.

The problem here is that Bradley Cooper and the filmmakers are afraid to go AMERICAN PSYCHO, so a hinted at black-out murder is just a plotline dropped in time for the big climax of battling Russian thug cliches. And instead of some bitter downward spiral, where our Cooper -- who plays a self-absorbed science fiction writer too stupid to take an offered pill from his ex-brother-in-law -- goes mad or turns evil once initiated into the realms of heavy power, we have him become a Tom Cruise-style action star. Once he does make the grade, so far so good, but then, on his big day presenting his portfolio to Robert De Niro's power-talking tycoon, he decides not to take a pill, so he's sick from withdrawal, and almost throws up on De Niro's thousand dollar loafers. Turns out he has a stash of pills at his girlfriend's house, but of course never dreams of getting it, because that would be too easy. Instead she (Abbie Cornish) has to get it, on her lunch hour, while he shivers like a crackhead in her office.

Don't doubt that I personally am similar and as we say in AA, had a lot of identification. I was a horribly blocked writer, tortured with longing, until my shrink put me on Effexor, and now I'm super-human on the keypad, writing so damn much my fingers fall off, smoking and staying otherwise sober, for the kids, but always riding that low throbbing train of motivation and focus. Drugs have been overcoming writer's block since the dawn of pencils, but that's not Bradley's problem, it's having his girlfriend be so dismayed that his newfound confidence wasn't real, since it was boosted by a substance. Listen lady, substances are the core of existence. We wouldn't even have civilization if not for coffee. We'd still be asleep, and cranky, in our thatched huts, hoping and dreaming that someone else will bring us some breakfast. But Cooper's refusal to remember he has pills around until it's time to try to take them to fight Russians is just not believable.

Imagine Popeye spending hours trying to open a can of spinach, his hands shaking, finally needing Olive to do it while he stammers through his teeth, an empty pipe in the corner of his clenched mouth. Not good. Popeye needs an open can ever at the ready, and so he has it. Has Bradley ever tried spinach? From a can? No, too cool for that; his spinach is fresh from Balducci's - all he needs is a little pill, and he's such a genius he can't even remember he's dead in the water without one.

 

I won't give away the ending, but I will tell you its needlessly happy, a validation of Hollywood's fetish for solipsism's comely victims. What the story cries out for is a finale reflecting the terrifying loss of control and sanity that comes from tampering too long with your brain chem--as in the endings of, say, AMERICAN PSYCHO (2000, top, bottom), where the feeling is one of both return/victory and of a trap snapping shut all around you that you are powerless to prevent. In the vapid clutches of Reese Weatherspoon's debutante, our strange protagonist Christian Bale comes to the realization that he has absolutely no idea if he's been dreaming or actually living all his murders. Instead, LIMITLESS bears out the feeling one gets amongst financial market people that they're doing their country a service by making themselves hugely rich. Why doesn't our super-enlightened Bradley figure out a cure for AIDS, or how to levitate, or remote view alien worlds, or make some draconian decision to wipe out half the population in a plague he's designed, carefully by hand, in order to make the world less crowded, ala LATHE OF HEAVEN? No, he goes for politics, and the position of state senator. What a tool.

In the end, this drug just kind of turns you into Tom Cruise, and for the Los Angeles power worshippers, that's everything: assertive narcissism and total fearless confidence. We love that trait like we love gangster movies, or mad scientists, or Hannibal Lecter, but you can't have your face and eat it too, you can't expect that Bradley alone is rising in the ranks. What of all the others struggling for their angry fix? In reality pills like this come along all the time, but trouble is, everyone finds out about them and within a year taking it doesn't give you a leg up on the competition so much as barely keep you in it.  

Cooper's character seemed pretty stupid to begin with, but he loves his drugs and we're supposed to be in awe of him irregardless of Abbie Cornish's disappointment. In the end we come away angry at our own trapped potential, but there's a reason we shuttered up the upper rooms of our brain mansion: there be monsters locked away up thar. Tread lightly, and bring a good therapist, and a sword, or suffer the consequences, unless you're Bradley Cooper, for not even the darkest demon can compete with the gravitic drag of such black hole vanity.