Submarine
Richard Ayoade (2010)
Joe Dunthorne’s 2008 novel Submarine must be very popular. I saw Richard Ayoade’s film adaptation at the start of its second week at the Richmond Odeon (late Friday afternoon) – one of the small screens but it was still unusual to see the place full and, although most of the audience were youngish, a few looked older than me. It’s hard to believe that any of the cast, or Ayoade himself, is this kind of box-office draw: there must have been people there who were already fans of the book. That may also be why plenty of them seemed primed to laugh from the word go, whereas I took some time to get onto the film’s wavelength. Set in Swansea, Submarine is a coming-of-age story and the early teenage protagonist Oliver Tate at first comes over as an intellectually advanced Adrian Mole, with Oliver’s desire for Jordana Bevan, a girl in his class at school, an echo of Adrian’s passion for Pandora. I never felt the themes and structure of Submarine were greatly original but the eccentric detail is funny and fresh, the look of the film is always lively and sometimes surprising, and the tone is secure and likeable. The behaviour of Oliver and his family, and the situations they find themselves in, are often laughable but the characters themselves are never merely ridiculous. The Swansea coastline is strongly individual – so much so that, even when Oliver’s doing an Antoine Doinel, it’s the sea you notice as much as the reference to Les quatre cents coups. The reference works well in any case: it’s the kind of fantasy that the culturally ambitious Oliver would have – and it makes you see both the slight kinship and the gulf between him and Truffaut’s young alter ego.
Richard Ayoade, who did the screenplay, handles the fantasist side of Oliver very well. The first time I laughed was at his imagining his death and the whole of Wales in Diana-like mourning. Ayoade keeps slipping in bits of fantasy so that the lines between what is and isn’t really happening to Oliver get blurred – and we get a sense of the proximity of the two worlds in Oliver’s mind. Submarine is also good at getting across the vicious pecking order among adolescent school-kids, especially in the taunting of a fat girl. There’s a sequence when Jordana and another boy have nicked the girl’s satchel; Oliver is joining in because he wants to ingratiate himself with Jordana. They’re in a wood and there’s an expanse of standing water behind them. The fat girl moves to try and catch her satchel that the others have thrown into the air and there’s a freeze frame, which tells us and Oliver that she’s going to land flat on her back in the muddy pool. When she does, it’s upsetting – but also the moment at which the character of Oliver, because he can’t laugh this off like Jordana and the other boy, starts to mean more. Ayoade pushes to a more broadly comic extreme something like going through drawers in your parents’ bedroom. The teen feeling that you’ve a right to personal privacy and to be nosey comes over well. Oliver’s determined to lose his virginity, with Jordana, before his fifteenth birthday; at the same time, he keeps his mother Jill under increasingly close surveillance, once an old flame of hers has arrived on the scene. Submarine may be essentially generic; still, the fact that Oliver makes it with Jordana but this doesn’t put his life simply in order makes the film relatively distinctive within its genre.
Oliver’s low-flying academic father Lloyd is a marine biologist. He also tends to depression: as he explains to his son at one point, Lloyd often feels himself ‘under water’. The film’s title also picks up things that Oliver says in his voiceover narrative about ultrasound being used by submarines, and human beings not being among the animal species that can pick it up – and, as a result, staying self-enclosed. As he explains in the film’s prologue, everyone thinks they’re the most important person in the world. Like Lloyd, Oliver is self-aware in understanding the workings of his own mind, less perceptive of the effect he’s having on other people until it’s too late. Richard Ayoade has a sharp but sympathetic feel for both the entertaining and the cowardly, hurtful aspects of egocentrism. Oliver, who likes reading dictionaries, is very much his nerdy father’s son – even if Lloyd’s lack of emotional intelligence can still take him by surprise: when he finds out Oliver’s got a serious girlfriend, Lloyd gives him a cassette (the antiqueness of that seems right) with ‘celebration’ tracks on one side and ‘despondency’ ones, for when the relationship dies the death, on the other.
Ayoade might have encouraged Craig Roberts to play Oliver a bit straighter, in the early stages anyway. Roberts (who was nearly nineteen when the film was shot, in late 2009) has a sufficiently unusual face to mean there’s no need for him to try to look weird. When Oliver stares into space at his desk in class, Roberts’ expression is rather brilliant – he seems miles away but the gaze is rapt and penetrating too. Compared with this, his wide-eyed scrutiny of what his mother’s up to is forced. I grew to like Roberts, though – he develops real emotional shadings, while staying droll. This is equally true of Yasmin Paige as Jordana. It’s sometimes hard to make out what she’s saying but, when you can, Paige’s timing is good and she too becomes much more complex than the unreachable, inscrutable tease that Jordana is at the start of the film. As Oliver’s mother, Sally Hawkins is excellent again: her combination of underlying neurosis and willed calm, expressed in a sonorously posh voice, is very funny. It’s hard to believe that Jill ever had a thing with the New Age charlatan who comes back into her life and threatens her marriage but it doesn’t matter as he’s played by Paddy Considine. (I didn’t understand either why, when they go to the cinema, it’s to see, in this day and age, a Crocodile Dundee film. Unlike Lloyd’s cassette, there seems no good reason for this.) Considine is playing a performer and he puts on a great show in every sense as he demonstrates the ‘Graham T Purvis System’ (of ‘psychic excellence and physical excellence’). I can’t think of another actor working in films today who can grandstand while revealing deep inadequacy as originally as Paddy Considine.
For once, though, he doesn’t give the outstanding performance. That prize goes to Noah Taylor, as Lloyd. I don’t recall seeing Taylor since he played (memorably) the student-age David Helfgott in Shine (1996). Now in his early forties, he’s worrying to look at – his face deathly pale and deeply furrowed – but he’s a perfect illustration of Lloyd’s profound nerdiness, which verges on Asperger’s. Taylor’s line readings are phenomenally precise and wittily expressive. The film’s supple score is by Andrew Hewitt and when Oliver puts on Lloyd’s mood swing music – whichever side he plays – it brings up songs by Alex Turner, the Arctic Monkeys frontman, which are enjoyable too. The presence of Paddy Considine and the Arctic Monkeys connection naturally bring to mind Le Donk & Scor-Zay-Zee and, like that film, Submarine was produced by Mark Herbert. Ben Stiller was one of the executive producers and, according to IMDB, appears momentarily as a soap opera face on television (although I missed him). With Gemma Chan as Graham T Purvis’s short-lived girlfriend Kim-Lin and a couple of actors familiar from Gavin and Stacey – Melanie Walters, as Jordana’s mother, and Steffan Rhodri, as Oliver’s form teacher.
25 March 2011