Sarah T. begins with a faux beer commercial, beer-drinking fun people having lots of beer-fueled fun—“So, go where you want to go! Be what you want to be! Happiness is Corey’s Beer!”—then freeze-frames to give us the stern voiceover:
STERN VOICEOVER
There are approximately half a million preteen and teenage alcoholics in this country today, and the number is growing. Three out of every four teenagers do some drinking. One out of twenty has a serious drinking problem. One in ten will become an alcoholic. . it may take an adult fifteen years to become an alcoholic. It takes a teenager fifteen months. .
These statistics sound impressive, but I ignore them because they are inviting me to do math. I do appreciate the ironic underscoring of fun beer commercial images and PSA-style warning, but I am only mildly interested in what else might be in store; I have never seen a movie about an “alcoholic” before, nor met one in real life — to my knowledge — and the word itself is so clinical, so far off in the abstract realm of adults and adult-size problems given quantifiable, diagnostic labels. I consider changing the channel.
But another freeze-frame, now on a teenage girl’s sad, pudgy face:
STERN VOICEOVER
This is Sarah Travis. She is fifteen years old. She’s an alcoholic.
And I immediately recognize this Sarah Travis as Linda Blair, possessed child of The Exorcist and anguished runaway from last year’s television Movie of the Week Born Innocent, famous for its never-again-shown-on-television shower room rape scene. Linda’s Kewpie-doll face and her bewildered adolescent angst make her so sweetly vulnerable. So relatable, like a friend. I am intrigued. What will befall this sweet girl this time, what perilous devil will be seeking her out?
The cautionary narrative begins at a cocktail party thrown by Sarah’s mother and new stepfather, where the stepdad’s new boss urges young Sarah to have a drink—“It’ll help the medicine go down!”—and this kind of party is also relatable, so, so familiar to me; my parents are famous for their wild bashes, where I am trotted out to pass around mini quiches and stuffed mushrooms to increasingly drunk and raucous adults, sent off to bed at midnight, and awaken in the morning to find people in mod polyester sleeping off their hangovers on the harvest-gold shag carpeting of our living room. Sarah demurs, but when the boss’s back is turned, she finishes off the adults’ drinks all on her own: She drains glass after glass, and even with the medicinal grimace, it’s clear she is actually a seasoned pro at this adaptive technique. This has never occurred to me. I have never tasted alcohol in my life.
The next morning, Sarah listens to her hungover mother and stepfather bemoan how much booze they’d gone through (also a scenario I relate to, and a conversation I could repeat word for word). Her beloved, failed-artist father visits, carrying around a six-pack in a shopping bag (Larry Hagman, perhaps Method-acting from his own alcoholic life), popping beer after beer as he leads Sarah on with a fantasy of their running off to live in the woods, where he will do his painting and they will escape all life’s problems, just father and daughter together.
Meanwhile, to deal with life’s problems, Sarah has a repertoire of tricks: A liquor store delivery is achieved by pretending her (off somewhere) mother is in the shower and getting the delivery guy to leave a bag of booze; she filches from the liquor cabinet in her picture-perfect older sister’s apartment; she waters down the household bottles with a chemist’s precision; she sneaks vodka into her soda can from a bottle of cologne she keeps in her locker at school. I applaud all this ingenuity and deception; it is evidence of the deep-running rivers beneath her flat-affect surface. Her secrecy grants her power, significance, a complexity beyond her years. This is no boringly normal teenage girl with standard-issue issues: This is a girl containing multitudes, layers upon layers of pain. If only anyone would pay attention, look beyond the placid façade.
On a blind date with her stepfather’s boss’s son Ken (a pre — Luke Skywalker Mark Hamill), he offers her a drink at a Popular Kids party, and, after token protest, she sucks one down. She is initially a hit; she loosens up, dances, jokes, sings in that movie-party way, where everyone suddenly gathers round to listen and applaud. But, after sneaking more drinks from the bar, she tips her hand when she becomes a sloppy drunk, shoving a plate of potato salad into a Mean Girl’s chest and barely able to stagger home to her horrified mom and stepdad. Mark Hamill/Ken gallantly takes the blame, and her parents, after an ostensible display of disapproval, shrug it off: “So, she had a little to drink. At least she’s not into drugs.” I agree with her parents; the applauding party kids, the appreciative gleam in Ken’s eye, were well worth whatever minor downside was created by a few belts. It isn’t as though she’s a heroin addict.
But the liquor store delivery guy gets wise and cuts off her supply; the housekeeper, the only adult who seems to offer her any understanding or solace, gets fired for “getting into” the family liquor, triggering a new source of guilt and despair; and Ken, watching Sarah at a beach party guzzle gin through a straw from a spiked watermelon like a starving piglet, is getting worried, realizing he has not, in fact, been the corrupting influence:
KEN
You don’t drink like a beginner, Sarah.
SARAH
Oh, come on! You make me sound like some major alcoholic freak. I don’t see any purple cockroaches climbing the walls. Look, I take a drink every now and then because it makes me feel better, makes all the hassles with my parents and the stuff at school go down a little easier. I don’t have to drink. I can quit any time I feel like it. I just don’t feel like it.
Exactly. No biggie. Sarah is called in to a conference with a guidance counselor and her mother for slipping grades, missing class, etc., but Mom is distracted, eager to accept Sarah’s lame Good Girl excuses, and I’m not worried, either. I’m just not getting the real peril, here. But Sarah is devastated to discover Ken has been dating other girls (she by now has fallen madly in love with his kind blue eyes, his cool truck, and his sweet horse); she polishes off a carafe of wine while babysitting a toddler and is found passed out on the couch. I have just begun babysitting, myself (conscientiously, of course — perhaps more so than the parents who leave their four-week-old baby in the care of an eleven-year-old girl who has never held a baby before), and I find this lack of responsibility disturbing. Her parents flip out, but primarily over how it will look, what people will think. And Sarah, out of tricks and rendered ironically invisible amid all this concern about “appearances,” finally confesses:
SARAH
Mom, listen to me. I’ve been drinking for nearly two years now. Almost every day. I’ve snuck booze from the house and I’ve stolen it from liquor stores. Who knows, I probably would’ve drunk rubbing alcohol if I couldn’t get my hands on anything else.