This is the critique of the final version of this film. The critique of the rough cut was done for our November 15th, 2006 issue. As many of the elements from the original critique still hold true, I will leave them in. Changes have been denoted by bold text.
When the Smoke Clears is the tale of three drug-infested roommates--Chris, Shawn, and Ray--on the edge of Chicago in 2000. Friends since childhood, their involvement in the drug scene has gone on nearly as long. Chris works as a techie at the local TV station and goes to a community college, hoping to eventually go to film school. He uses drugs and alcohol to try and cope with the stresses of life and his girlfriend. To make ends meet, he sells a little weed to friends and neighbors, but lacks the vicious personality required to do so very successfully. Shawn lacks almost all ambition due to the fact that he is high most of the time. As such, he doesn’t even try to go to school, but instead works a dead end job at an arthouse movie theater, spending his day skimming from the till and selling weed to the other workers. Ray, on the other hand, doesn’t just dabble in drug dealing like his roommates; he’s a full-blown drug dealer, with the vicious tendencies required to make a name for himself. Ray’s brother got him into the life as a drug mule and, now that his brother’s in prison, Ray holds himself responsible to uphold and expand his brother’s turf while he’s in the pen.
All three friends are headed into the oblivion of drug addiction and violence when Chris happens to run into Carlos, a friend from college who he’d lost touch with. Carlos begins to hang out with Chris a lot, soon becoming a regular fixture at the drug and booze parties at Chris’ place. Although he imbibes along with everyone else, Carlos represents a ray of reason in Chris’ drug- and alcohol-muddled mind. When he finds out that Chris has been so wasted that he’s in danger of flunking out of the community college and never going to film school, Carlos insists that Chris is smart enough to make a name for himself in the entertainment industry and that he can’t quit just because things are harder than he expected. He tells Chris not to settle for a life of drug-induced mediocrity. Chris listens to what Carlos has to say, but doesn’t put much stock in it initially.
[Spoilers Are Necessarily Coming] However, Chris’ perspective changes drastically when he goes to work one day a few days later and finds out on the very news show he works on that Carlos was killed when he ran a red light and was hit by a semi. (The implication being that Carlos may have been wasted when he took his ill-fated drive.) With Carlos’ death, Chris sinks into depression and self-examination. Unwilling to be the frivolous person he once was, he decides to stop doing drugs and drinking and ends up breaking up with his girlfriend. He begins to put in concentrated effort at school, choosing to improve his grades to the point where he can actually go to film school.
While Chris is slowly crawling out of the pit, Shawn and Ray are diving steadily deeper and deeper into it. Shawn starts doing heroine when a client offers to trade him some in exchange for some weed. As he becomes more firmly addicted, his ability to perceive danger decreases and he ups the amount he is stealing from the till at his work. Eventually his rate of theft is so great that his boss finds out and fires him. After the loss of his day job, Shawn must work more extensively with Ray in order to make ends meet and afford the drugs he lives on.
Ray is trying to enlarge his turf, growing more and more violent as he does so. Eventually, his older brother encourages him to whack a competing drug dealer named Kevin, a man who has a history with both Ray and Shawn. Loading a pump-action shotgun he received from a client, Ray tells Shawn to be his getaway driver and the two of them drive to Kevin’s house. Shawn, although wasted, doesn’t want to be part of a murder and only agrees to drive when Ray lies to him and tells him that he’s just going to rob Kevin. Ray goes into Kevin’s place and ruthlessly makes his adversary lie on the floor, where he proceeds to blow his brains out with the shotgun. After that, he steals the drugs Kevin has lying around and he and Shawn make their escape. Although they cover their tracks and evade the cops, the realization of what they have done begins to further weigh down on both Ray and Shawn, driving them deeper into the abyss.
Chris graduates with much-improved grades from the community college and gets accepted to a film school in Southern Illinois. Ray’s younger brother has just finished high school and, when he gets accepted to the same school, the two of them decide to room together. Before heading off, they have one last celebration with Ray and Shawn. Chris proposes a toast to “our future.” Ray shakes his head muttering, “No. You two have a future. We just have our memories.”
A few weeks later, Ray ends up getting cornered by cops, apparently in a vehicle full of contraband. Rather than be taken alive, he pulls out a pistol, says an angry prayer to God, then shoots himself in the head. A few months later Shawn OD’s and is thrown into a coma, which he is still in to this day. In the end, out of these four friends, only Chris survived the year 2000 alive and conscious.
