When Love is not enough
The other Friday evening I was wandering aimlessly around my local shopping street strip with my flatmate and we found ourselves in the video store. I hire a video about once every six months, but she watches a good many more than that, and hired three overnights on this particular occasion because she wasn’t feeling so great. One of these three was a new release called When Love is Not Enough - The Lois Wilson Story. Lois Wilson was the wife of Bill Wilson, who founded Alcoholics Anonymous, and later founded Al-Anon herself.
If you have been reading this blog for a while you’d know that for a time I helped out with Overcomers Outreach. In so doing I became familiar with Alcoholics Anonymous, its workings and history, read the book Pass it On, and so I was naturally instantly interested in this movie. (It didn’t actually screen in cinemas, which explains why I had never heard of it.)
I enjoyed it a lot. Though I cried buckets, because Lois’s story was far from rosy and the movie is not unrealistic, showing the moments when she throws a shoe at her husband in frustration, more or less tells him she wishes he had the decency to die and the time when she did temporarily leave him. Yet her commitment and tenacity ultimately hold on, and it becomes an extraordinary story of how together they made it through alcoholism (as well as their childlessness) and of the ministry to others they built as a result.
As the tagline on the DVD says of Lois, “her love and devotion to one man changed the lives of thousands”, and the movie honours her support and encouragement of her husband, readily acknowledging that he could not have done what he did without her behind him. However, it still makes plain that it wasn’t actually Lois’s love that enabled Bill to give up alcohol (thus “when love is not enough”), but a “spiritual” experience. Hooray to Hollywood for letting this movie convey that truth. The film actually didn’t do as badly as it might have done with all that was Christian in their story, and I was pleasantly surprised by what was left to be as it was.
Winona Ryder was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award for her role as Lois, her 1920's outfits alone make this film something to be seen and I thought this DVD was well worth the time.
Picture from here.