Better Living Through Chemistry

What's a small town pharmacist to do when his life isn't going the way he dreamed? That's the tale that Better Living Through Chemistry tells and it tells it very well.

Sam Rockwell is Doug Varney, the small town pharmacist. He's just bought out his father-in-law's interest in the local store, and the insufferable man has the gall to insist that since people know the name, Bishop's, that it should stay, leaning Doug owning a store that doesn't even bear his name. His wife is overbearing, and his son is getting in trouble at school, and all of it leaves him trudging through life, hoping only to make it to the next day but never looking forward to it.

Until he meets Elizabeth, a lonely trophy wife, with whom he begins an affair, and who convinces him to pilfer a few chemicals from the phamacy to enhance their trists. Soon Doug is adding chemistry to other facets of his life, and figuring out what it is he wants from life and not just what he can give to other people.

There is only one hitch... Elizabeth casually mentions that perhaps, maybe, if her husband with a heart condition were to get the wrong prescription, then the two of them might run off together.

Other reviewers have turned up their nose at this, admittedly, pedestrian plot. They call it safe and stale. But for me, the beauty of this film is in watching Sam Rockwell take Doug through his journey of a subsistance kind of life into one of excess and back to a stable good life that makes him happy.

Better Living Through Chemistry isn't likely to knock your socks off, but I throughly enjoyed the time I spent with it.