Daily Archives: Wednesday, August 5, 2015

  • Locke

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Steven Knight (2013)

    Ivan Locke leaves work – a building site on which he’s the construction manager – one evening.  Instead of driving home to his wife and two sons in Birmingham, he sets off down the motorway towards London.   The reason is to be present at the birth of his third child, although he hasn’t met the mother-to-be since they worked together in Croydon the previous year.  Bethan was lonely; Ivan felt sorry for her; they both had too much wine and went to bed together; it was a one-night stand, to say the most.  Once Ivan is in his car, that’s where the writer-director Steven Knight keeps his camera, except for occasional shots of the roads outside.  Ivan has almost continuous phone conversations during the journey but Locke is visually a one-man show and comes pretty close to telling its story in real time:  the film’s ninety minutes equate to two or so hours of the evening in question – in the course of which Ivan loses his job, his marriage seems to end, and Bethan’s baby is born.   Its unusual form makes Knight’s second feature (after last year’s Hummingbird) daring in two main ways.   First, the scenario suggests a radio play:  can the story be made visually interesting?  Second, Ivan Locke is played by Tom Hardy, an actor whose filmography to date is long on action roles involving physical violence:  how will he cope in a part that’s all about face, voice and sitting still?

    Locke meets both these challenges successfully.   I may be more ready than most to watch a single actor’s face for an hour and a half, on a drive in darkness on the outskirts of London.  Nevertheless, Steven Knight and his cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos make the lights on the road expressive: they offer a kind of impersonal warmth.  Inside Ivan Locke’s BMW, the panel that indicates who is calling him or who he’s trying to call presses various emotional buttons – guilt, apprehension, exasperation, antipathy (the number of Ivan’s boss Gavin comes up on the screen in the name of ‘Bastard’).  The visual texture becomes surprisingly strong – the tension on the soundtrack is increased by the repeated interruption of one call with a recorded voice reminding Ivan that he has another call waiting.  Tom Hardy, whom I’ve not rated previously, does more than hold the screen and your attention.  Once you’ve got used to his emphatic Welsh accent, you’re able to appreciate the more subtle details of his performance.  Hardy is especially good when his jittery (and, by this stage, no longer sober) deputy Donal eventually makes Ivan laugh, and when he has to struggle to keep his self-control in conversations with his sons.

    The situation is well worked out by Knight (whose best-known screenplays are Dirty Pretty Things and Eastern Promises).  I wondered at first why Ivan had kept the secret of Bethan and her pregnancy to himself until the very night she’s giving birth; it turns out the baby is two months premature and, Ivan tells his wife Katrina, he had kept meaning and failing to tell her what had happened in Croydon.  You never doubt how good Ivan is at his job.  A major concrete pour, for the foundations of a big new building, is due for delivery the following morning.  Ivan knows he’ll get fired for not being there to supervise but he’s determined, even after Gareth confirms that he’s lost his job, to make the necessary arrangements.  (A combination of duty and pride impel Ivan to do this.)  It’s a good touch that he’s sufficiently distracted to find he has a crucial file with him on the passenger seat – he meant to leave it in the office drawer where he assures Donal it can be found.  Ivan nevertheless still manages to tell Donal everything he needs to know, as well as negotiate eleventh-hour clearance from the local council for a crucial road closure to allow the concrete to be delivered early next day.  Getting all this seen to is the most suspenseful part of Locke.

    You’re naturally anxious that the woebegone Bethan’s baby will be safely delivered (there’s a problem when the umbilical cord is wrapped round the baby’s neck) but the domestic aspect of Ivan’s dark night isn’t so absorbing.  The changing significance of the football match the family were expecting to watch together on television is too obviously shaped.  The game is absolutely important in itself in Ivan’s first conversations with his sons; by the end of the film, his younger boy Eddie is leaving a message on Ivan’s phone suggesting that, when he comes home, they watch the match again and pretend they don’t know the result (the right team won) – in other words, that they try to put the clock back to earlier in the evening when they were a happy family.

    The part of Ivan’s enraged wife, who can’t forgive her husband’s one-off unfaithfulness, is relatively weakly written too.   You can just about believe that Katrina makes an instant decision that she never wants to see Ivan again but some of the lines Knight gives her, as Katrina summarises what was wrong with their relationship, don’t ring true, so quickly after his shock revelation.   The phrasing of her tirade about his being married to his work – Ivan’s work boots walked concrete into the kitchen, it sometimes set, Katrina had to scrape it off the tiles – is too incisively assured.   Ivan’s line of work as a whole is obviously symbolic (the edifice of his conscientiously constructed life suddenly collapses) but the logistical details around the concrete pour are so good that you don’t mind.  His surname may be symbolic too and Knight’s use of it as the film’s title is surely significant.  This is the story of someone who may be a control freak, who’s kept his personal and professional life in order and who, now that it’s in free fall, still keeps his eyes on the road and, much of the time, his emotions in check.  The clear enunciation of the Welsh accent is right for a man who, in spite of his predicament, has got a to-do list for the evening and the following morning, and won’t be deflected.  (‘I have made a decision’, he tells Bastard Gareth repeatedly.)   The person who motivates Ivan’s determination to be present at the birth of Bethan’s child is neither seen nor heard – but Ivan appears to imagine him in the driving mirror and has angry, quasi-conversations with him:  the dead, feckless father who was never there for his son.  These interludes are somewhat theatrical in the context of the film but I felt Tom Hardy’s discipline was such that he deserved to be allowed to let off steam in this way.

    Hardy is given fine support by the voices of Olivia Colman (Bethan), Ben Daniels (Gareth) and, especially, Andrew Scott (Donal).  Some of the smaller vocal contributions are perfectly judged too – particularly those of Alice Lowe (from Sightseers) and Silas Carson as, respectively, a sister and an obstetrician at the maternity hospital.  Ivan’s family are the relatively weak links:  Ruth Wilson can’t do much with Katrina and, while Bill Milner is good as the older son Sean, Tom Holland’s Eddie sounds as if he’s reading lines.  (While I was watching the film, it struck me this might be a particular challenge for a child but Holland, who was good in The Impossible, is pretty experienced.)   I probably got more out of Locke than I expected because the protagonist’s plight came as a surprise:  I knew the film took place largely inside the car but didn’t realise that Tom Hardy was the only person seen at all – I’d also taken literally Robbie Collin’s commendation of the picture as ‘one of the most nail-biting thrillers of the year’.  I was pleased to discover it wasn’t a crime story but I didn’t find it as compelling as all that.  Locke’s distinctive form is also its limitation.  I was held by it but the most involving uncertainty of the film was not what would happen in the end but whether Steven Knight and Tom Hardy could keep the thing going.  They do; but Locke is a feat rather than a fully engaging drama.

    24 April 2014

  • Broken

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Rufus Norris (2012)

    An hour or so into Broken, Rufus Norris’s first feature, the young teenage heroine cries:  ‘It’ll go wrong … everything always go wrong … why do all the bad things happen – never anything good?’ (Or words to that effect.)  These are good questions to ask of the film, adapted by Mark O’Rowe from a novel by Daniel Clay.   Like Paddy Considine’s Tyrannosaur, Broken won the BIFA for best film; like Tyrannosaur, its bleakness may disarm criticism in some quarters.  If you say the bleakness is excessive you can stand accused of being unable to take the truth.  Tyrannosaur and Broken aren’t exactly kindred spirits, though. The power of Considine’s film derives from the possibility that things could be other than grim, and the performances by Peter Mullan and, especially, Olivia Colman, which embrace that possibility.  And though their characters’ fate is predetermined, some of the dialogue that Considine wrote for his fine actors is humorous and textured.  What the two films do have in common is an appetite for showing how violently unhappy lives in England today can be.  The world they present is wholly dystopian – there’s not a sense that anyone on the margins of the story might be enjoying themselves a bit.  The Wikipedia plot synopsis for Broken describes the protagonist Skunk, her elder brother Jed and their solicitor father Archie as living ‘in a typical British suburb’.  (The household also includes an au pair, which naturally raises the question of quite how typical it is.)  Their neighbours on one side are Mr and Mrs Buckley, whose twentysomething son Rick has learning difficulties.  On the other, there’s the widowed Bob Oswald:  he has anger management problems and feral teenage daughters.  The exterior of these houses may be typical; it’s incredible that the mayhem going on inside them is too.  Jimmy McGovern’s BBC drama The Street was pushing it in this respect but the concentration of trauma in Broken is on a different level: there seem to be only three houses on the street and each one is an epicentre of agony.

    The plot, not worth going into, is engineered for maximum gruelling (and garish) effect.  Some of the questions that occurred to me during the ninety minutes give a flavour of the story.   When Bob Oswald beats up, first, Rick Buckley and, second, a teacher at Skunk’s school (and the au pair’s ex-boyfriend), why do the police start by arresting the person who’s been attacked, without bothering to find out Oswald’s reasons for carrying out the assault?   How is it that the pathologically overprotective Oswald allows a drugs party to take place in his house – the threshold of which, until this point in the story, no non-family member has crossed?   After Rick fatally stabs his mother and wounds his father one evening (before taking his own life), what does Mr Buckley do throughout the night – so that he doesn’t know that the diabetic Skunk, who’s also in the house, has been having a hyperglycaemic attack for many hours in the same room where Rick’s corpse is lying – and it’s left for Bob Oswald, whose own daughter has had a fatal miscarriage the previous evening (she was made pregnant by Jed) to rescue her?   (I’m not making this up.)

    There never seems to be enough light in the images, as if Rufus Norris had asked his DoP Rob Hardy to keep reminding the viewer what dark matter the film is composed of – as if daylight would detract from an uncompromising approach.  On the plus side, the music by Electric Wave Bureau, aka Damon Albarn (who collaborated with Rufus Norris on the 2011 stage work Doctor Dee), is lively, and its moods various – very refreshing in this context.  And some of the performances make what’s happening on screen, as well as on the soundtrack, worthwhile too.  Larry Lamb’s thirteen-year-old daughter Eloise Laurence has wit as well as truthfulness as Skunk.  Rory Kinnear plays Bob Oswald with skilful empathy – he makes you (nearly) believe in what impels Oswald’s behaviour so that the man’s my-girls-can-do-no-wrong mindset is genuinely alarming.  Robert Emms gives the troubled Rick a touching self-awareness – particularly in his reluctance to return home from the mental hospital he’s been in.   There’s nothing that Denis Lawson and Clare Burt (Eloise Laurence’s mother) can do, though, with the clichéd roles of Rick’s anxious, infantilising parents.  The cast also includes Tim Roth (as Archie), Cillian Murphy (the teacher), and Zana Marjanovic (the au pair).

    Broken is a reminder that a film straining to paint things black is – because of the straining – almost always more lowering than an organic dramatisation of unhappy lives.  Perhaps the very worst thing in the movie is the no less contrived hopeful ending.   It’s Bob Oswald, who seemed beyond redemption, who is Skunk’s eventual saviour.  After he’s found her unconscious, she hovers in hospital on the verge of death; indeed, she has a dream in which her family and neighbours – a fair number of whom have by now lost their lives – are gathered together in a church and appear to be inviting her to stay with them.   Skunk, however, follows the receding figure of her father back to the land of the living:  she wakes from her coma to appreciate him as never before.  I saw this film at the end of the week in which the case of Nicola Edgington had been in the news.  The schizophrenic Edgington made repeated 999 calls, insisting that she needed medical help, shortly before murdering another woman.  It’s difficult – crude and lurid as the Rick Buckley strand of the story in Broken is – to ignore the resonance with the Edgington controversy.  It’s nowhere near enough, however, to make the film ‘true’.

    The other odd but superficial resonance is with To Kill a Mockingbird:  there’s the vaguely tomboyish girl protagonist (Skunk/Scout), who has an older brother (Jed/Jem) and a wifeless father whose business is the law;   the characters of Bob Oswald and Rick Buckley seem almost a conflation of qualities in Harper Lee’s Boo Radley, who turns out to be more than a figure of fun and/or fear.  I can’t say if Mike O’Rowe’s screenplay is a faithful adaptation of Broken and I don’t know if Daniel Clay has already written other novels.  But if it is, and if he hasn’t, I hope, with no disrespect to Harper Lee, that Clay follows suit and never publishes another.

    10 March 2013

     

Posts navigation