Say what you want about addiction, but for many who have suffered or are still suffering from it, it is mere luck of the draw. For Emily (played by Maggie Cheung), the protagonist of Clean, the hand she was dealt was a losing one as her struggles with heroin envelop her very sense of self (rock star, wife, mother).
Her existence lies at the needle’s end.
It is not only monetarily costly, but one emotionally as well, as she loses her husband Lee to an overdose, and, subsequently, her young son Jay (played by James Dennis), who lives with Lee’s parents (played by Nick Nolte and Martha Henry) after her custody is revoked.
It would be easy to dismiss her a good-for-nothing druggie, but Albrecht (Nolte) , now thechild’s leagal guardian approaches matters much more rationally. Perhaps it is because of his son’s death and the fact that he is now facing the mortality of his wife (who is hospitalized in the final stages of cancer), but the film’s title “Clean” may also refer to the slate on which Albrecht wants to start things in an attempt to mend what’s left of those in his life.
When he calmly whispers to his wife, “Someday we won’t be here. And she is the boy’s mother,” you can sense his compassion out of necessity.
Albrecht scans the woman, peeling the hardened layers to look for redeeming qualities in the mother of his grandchild. While Cheung won the Best Actress award at Cannes for her role in 2004, it was Nolte’s supporting part that really resonated. Perhaps it was Nolte’s own storied past, but it was almost as though he was looking inward for that essence of goodness.
And as the film works steadfastly toward its conclusion, there’s that final shot…sure to be the proverbial sand-drawn line that will divide audiences of the film. It is open to interpretation, which, personally, are the endings I love. I remember as a child reading books and then creating further situations/adventures/ etc. for the characters. It is an eccentricity I have sometimes after a particularly effective film-going process, one which contains characters about whom I cared.
In ‘Clean,” I continued the story of the characters in my head long after I finished the film.