He always struck me as a Scottish version of Tony Wilson, though without Wilson’s luck of occasionally helping create something great. Ego is a useful thing, it can get you through an awful lot of self-doubt. But 16 Years Of Alcohol, Jobson’s first film as writer/director, coasts on ego alone. Strip away Jobson’s stab at doing something important, and there is not much here except a cannibalisation of many much better films. Most notable is for a film called 16 Years Of Alcohol, we barely get to see those years. Instead we watch about two years of sobriety, and the piety of ex-alcoholics is not much fun.
It is a good film for the Edinburgh tourist, or at least it would it was not for the incessant violence outside every tourist attraction on show. Self-conscious writing remind you of a sixteen year olds school play, and of course the psychological angle dumps it all on the parents again. I am beginning to think that film studies should start thinking more about Larkin than Lacan: since the subtext of most films these days is “they fuck you up your Mum and Dad”. This is a tragic story for all the wrong reasons, a film which discards redemption for a nice cyclical ending and fundamentally has the wrong target. This film is not about 16 Years Of Alcohol, but rather 16 Years Of Violence. And there is little attractive about that.