‘Behind every great man,” the old saying used to go, “is a great woman.” Maybe it should have been, “Behind every great man is a woman who should run like her rear end was on fire.”
Take the case of the looong-suffering Lois Wilson, the woman behind, under and nearly crushed by Bill Wilson, the drunken co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.
If we are to believe everything in this new movie, “When Love Is Not Enough: The Lois Wilson Story,” a Hallmark Hall of Fame entry, then the woman who founded Al-Anon for the families of drunks should have also been a charter member of Saints Anonymous.
Winona Ryder, who has come back from her own battle with substance abuse, does a bang-up job as Lois Burnham Wilson, the college-educated daughter of an affluent doctor who marries the slightly younger Bill Wilson (played by Barry Pepper).
When Bill returns from World War I, Lois, a nurse, helps him find a job with her friend’s husband on Wall Street. Dreamer Bill quits and so does she, so they can pursue his fantasy of travelling the country on motorcycle to do in-depth, in-person studies of companies. His intention is to analyze them and send back the reports via telegraph to his old bosses on Wall St. as investment research.
It’s a brilliant concept and, when Wall Street approves of Bill’s first analysis, he celebrates by leaving Lois on the side of a muddy country road on the broken-down motorcycle while he goes into town to get hammered.
Does she leave him? No.
They return to New York and his new jobs as stock analyst and drunken bum.
Miscarriages, a hysterectomy (he shows up hours late at the hospital falling-down drunk) and the crash of ’29 leaves them broke and him in a stupor. Again.
She blames herself and tries to help him. He repays her by becoming a full-time drunk as they move into her father’s house.
Does she leave him for good then? No.
She blames herself again, with occasional breaks for bouts of fury at him.
When he hits rock bottom after 17 torturous years of marriage, Bill has a revelation and finally sobers up. Then he meets Dr. Bob Smith, another drunk, and together they found AA.
He spends all his time taking in drunks and having meetings and so they lose Lois’ father’s house, too.
Leave him this time? No.
It takes another 16 years of good AA deeds, homelessness and the kindness of strangers to keep them going.
She finally realizes that she has no one to unburden herself to and, after seeing all the drunks’ wives waiting alone outside meetings, starts Al-Anon.
Everyone does a wonderful job in this movie — but, in the end, it seems more like a rehash of writer Wiliam G. Borchert’s 1989 “Hall of Fame” movie, “My Name Is Bill W,” than a real portrait of the woman whose idea helped millions of suffering families.