The Angels’ Share
Ken Loach (2012)
The Angels’ Share is a very pleasurable surprise. The plotting is shaky and it’s hard to accept the argument that this is OK because the story is a ‘fairytale’, when most of the early sequences are intensely and upsettingly believable. But the film is enjoyable and succeeds because Ken Loach and the writer Paul Laverty express their well-known political views in a way that’s comic and, at the same time, incisive. After an overdone prologue (see below), the film starts proper with a succession of appearances in a magistrates’ court in Glasgow. The people given community payback penalties there turn out to be four of the five main characters in the story – Robbie, Albert, Mo and Rhino. The fifth principal is their community service supervisor, Harry. I hadn’t been looking forward to seeing the movie – because Ken Loach is politically serious-minded he makes me feel he’s doing you a favour making a comedy. But hopes are immediately raised by the court scene, where the establishment figures aren’t crudely caricatured. A few screen minutes later, Loach is describing, very graphically, how the main character Robbie Emerson – who has a record of violent crime and who escapes prison only because his girlfriend Leonie is about to give birth and Robbie’s counsel pleads that his domestic responsibilities have made him turn over a new leaf – is both prey to and primed for violence. There’s a noisome social prejudice which sees soccer fans who go on the rampage as hooligans whereas the misbehaviour of rugby union fans is harmless high spirits. In Looking For Eric – in the sequence where Eric and his mates threaten to give a local gangster and his sidekick a taste of their own medicine – Ken Loach came close to the same prejudice in reverse. That’s not the case in The Angels’ Share: the violence we see here is frightening whoever’s responsible for it, even though we’re always aware that Loach and Laverty are ascribing Robbie’s behaviour to the social and economic conditions in which he lives. In Loach’s sensitive hands Paul Brannigan, a Glaswegian with a criminal record but no professional acting experience before this film, gives an outstanding performance. Without sentimentalising him, he and Loach succeed in making canny, volatile, wary Robbie a hero.
Harry (excellent John Henshaw) is a whisky aficionado and he takes the group to visit a distillery. This is the starting point of the eccentric heist movie that The Angels’ Share turns into; it centres on the theft by Robbie and the others of four bottles’ worth of scotch of rare distinction and astonishing monetary value. Laverty’s script is very flimsy in working the story out – for example, the lack of security at the place where the whisky is being auctioned is incredible. As a result of their negotiations over the stolen goods, Robbie gets not only a hefty immediate payoff but also a job with an English whisky collector (Roger Allam); the film ends with Robbie, Leonie and baby Luke leaving Glasgow in a new car for a new life in Stirling. Leonie (Siobhan Reilly), who’s no fool and has been full of doubt that Robbie will change his ways, is remarkably incurious about how this has come about and her malignant father, who at one stage tries to pay Robbie off to get out of his daughter’s life, simply disappears from the film. Robbie develops a sophisticated nose for whisky in very quick time and Albert (Gary Maitland) is a crudely drawn dimwit. We first encounter him in that prologue: blind drunk on (and off) a deserted railway platform late at night, he nearly loses his life to a passing train and mistakes the angry chiding of a station announcer for the voice of God. The dumb things Albert says, designed for easy laughs, are just too dumb; you can’t believe the others – Robbie, Mo (Jasmin Riggins) and Rhino (William Ruane) – would put up with him. You almost feel it serves them right when Albert’s responsible for breaking two of the bottles of their precious theft.
None of these weaknesses matters much, though, because the characters and their story are mostly so involving and Ken Loach’s touch is so light and assured. He gives the scenes a reality and, often, a satisfying comic shape – the distillery tour and a whisky convention in Edinburgh (presided over by a real life auctioneer) are especially good in this respect. There are powerful, grimly convincing sequences too, like the one in which Robbie is confronted by a young man on the receiving end of his earlier violence and by the victim’s family. Loach shows the destructive effects of alcohol but it’s one of the strongest ideas in the film that it’s also the route, in Robbie’s case, to a new expertise and career prospects. The if-you-can’t-beat-’em element of the story is attractively honest: there’s no danger of the kids not getting away with their crime. Robbie, by engaging with the profit-making world, has bettered himself. He sells only one of the two surviving bottles of the ‘malt mill’, giving the other, disguised in an Irn Bru bottle, to Harry as thanks for giving him a chance. When Harry comes home to find the bottle and Robbie’s note, it’s one of those rare heartwarming moments that bring tears to your eyes along with the pleasure that the film-maker has earned them honourably. The ‘angels’ share’, as the guide at the distillery explains, is the two per cent of whisky that evaporates in the cask each year. In the scheme of the movie, it describes what Loach and Laverty see as the principals’ just desserts. As Robbie’s thank you note makes clear, it refers in the singular (and Robbie puts the apostrophe before the ‘s’ in his note) specifically to Harry. This is one of the best films of 2012 so far and it definitely has the best title.
6 June 2012