Junkie’s Sonata-Your Innocent When You Dream-This Is Not Johnny Milton’s Paradise Found- The Film Adaptation From The Jesse Stone Series Of Robert Parker’s “Innocents Lost” (2011)-A Short Made For Television Film Review

DVD Review

By Josh Breslin

Innocents Lost, starring Tom Selleck, 2011       

The late crime novel writer Robert B Parker, I think he liked to be called private detection writer but I prefer crime novel and since it is my dime there you have it, was a prophet, was man before his time in writing about the junkie wave that has descended upon the land of late. (Called the opioid crisis in polite society since this involves some of those polite society relatives but junkie wave is more like it, more the way novelist Nelson Algren who wrote the definitive novel on the subject The Man With The Golden Arm would have put it.) I was looking for a film, having already reviewed the film adaptation of Algren’s novel starring Frank Sinatra long along, that would bring a more contemporary edge to the subject. I didn’t want the sudden newspaper wave baloney detailing how the streets are not safe now with junkies shooting the works in every corner scaring little children or about some poor bastard being bopped on the head for his kale so some sullen cretin could see his (or her as we will see here) fixer man to get well-for a minute. So after some light scouting I found Innocents Lost and this is just the vehicle I need to do a modern day screed on junkie-hood, the junkie sonata.  

In the background of this one is the profound notion that a cop will always be a cop and that is the case with deposed police chief Jesse Stone who got bounced from his job for reasons unknown is pouting about getting back in harness.  (Unknown to me since I have not seen the previous eight films I think already produced in this series.) Getting back in harness in land’s end, in Paradise by the sea in some mythical Cape Ann locale if only he can overcome whatever it was that got him the boot. One thing for sure there was no heavy lifting on this job with crime and criminals staying far from this upscale town-which is exactly the way the uppity town’s people liked it-what the hell was Haverhill for anyway. (There were rumors that this Jesse Stone whose previous experience before falling down in Paradise was as a coffee and donut shop patrolman in La La land had put his name in for the vacant police commissioner’s job in New York City. The search committee had a good laugh as they tossed that one out on the first round. Everybody thought it was a joke since nobody had ever heard of Paradise, or knew it never existed and were hardly going to hire a stool-sore patrolman for their top gun.)  

While Jesse broods (and hard liquor drinks which may be the key to his getting kicked out of Paradise) in splendid isolation as he watches the tide come in he gets the nod on a couple of cases. Only one of which concerns us here, the junkie shoot-up case. (In the other one white-bread Jesse helps a stumble-down Boston cop figure out that a guy in a fatal hold-up was not the guy although that did the black suspect no good since his “alibi” was that he had raped some helpless woman some blocks away from the felony robbery. That is a Jesse resume builder for sure).    

While Jesse was wiling away the hours at the dingy Paradise police department offices he befriended a young woman, a college student named Laura, don’t get tied up with names when dealing with junkies especially those who have to hustle their asses in the street to get their fixer man dough, who before spiraling downward had been picked for DUI. This Laura was the daughter of a rich woman recently divorced from her husband, presumably for adultery although it could have been plenty of other things, who had zero concern for parenting or for her daughter. Laura as kids will took it hard and started slippery-slope drinking which brought her fatefully foursquare with Jesse. Jesse took her under his wing for a while but with his own drinking problems, his divorce and the pressures of the cop job (are you kidding the heaviest duty making the monthly quota for parking tickets) he lost track of her. Lost track until she wound up down the road from that splendid isolation place he lived in while plotting his comeback. Wound up dead from an overdose, from heroin, from sister, from boy, from H, whatever you call it in your neighborhood. Except in Jesse-less tourist trap Paradise they called it an accident by some stumblebum stranger passing through.  

The suddenly quasi-parental Jesse gets on the case, stops drinking for a couple of days if I recall. This Laura thing had to have been if not murder then not the official accident everybody in Paradise had bought into, had wished into with a vengeance. So Jesse goes on his own down and dirty investigation starting with that rehab mill she had gone into for the drinking problem (and it really was, they were pushing them out the minute the insurance stopped or Daddy Warbucks stops payments) over in Haverhill run by a doctored who lived in Paradise. Through cashing in a few favors, Jesse found out that this Laura had been busted for trafficking in drugs and her ass. How did that happen taking a young college girl and turning her into a junkie whore. Somebody was behind the whole thing, somebody had turned her on to the drugs and her spiral downward.

Of course Jesse finds the guy, a Russian guy naturally like this was still the Cold War who worked at that rehab mill. This bastard’s MO was to work the rehab mills, knowing that orderly help was hard to get for minimum wages. He would scout out the vulnerable ones, girls, guys it didn’t matter, load them up with feel good drugs and then put them on the street safe in the knowledge that he was connected with the right mobsters. End of story. Well not quite Jesse traps the guy by luring him and his next hustling girl to a hotel and humiliates him. Tough Russian guys though, connected or not, are not about to let some ex-cop have the last laugh so he goes after Jesse out there in Paradise splendor. Wrong move though in Jesse’s home turf. KIA. That didn’t bring back that fallen Laura, didn’t seem to be a resume-builder, didn’t do much to put a dent in society’s drug problems, didn’t stop his brooding and plotting but did allow him to get that fresh whiskey bottle out and pour a few fingers of the nectar. More later.