Daily Archives: Monday, February 15, 2016

  • Filth

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jon S Baird (2013)

    Two things surprised me about Filth, adapted by Jon S Baird from Irvine Welsh’s 1998 novel (which I’ve not read).  The first surprise was James McAvoy.  Some of the praise for his performance as the malignant protagonist, the Edinburgh detective Bruce Robertson, is a familiar reaction to an actor cast against type.  Even so, McAvoy in Filth goes well beyond anything I’ve seen him do before.  The second surprise – I’d expected a satirically amoral revel – is that Bruce Robertson is revealed to be not a simply nasty piece of work:  he’s traumatised by guilt about the death during their childhood of the kid brother of whom he was jealous – a death which Bruce caused.  At home, Bruce, when he’s not watching porn, is usually making dirty phone calls to the wife of a supposed friend but, later in the film, he tearfully watches a video of the wife who’s left him and the daughter she’s denying him access to.  When a man collapses with a heart attack in Grassmarket, Bruce is the only person to respond to the man’s wife’s screams for help, trying but failing to revive her husband.  Bruce sees the face of his lifeless brother as he works furiously to resuscitate the man.  Later on, under the influence of various drugs and drink, he experiences more grotesque and scary hallucinations.  It’s the residue of good nature in him that eventually kills Bruce, though:  he hangs himself with the Hearts scarf that the grateful Grassmarket widow has knitted for him.

    There’s a kind of echo here of Trainspotting.  In Danny Boyle’s film of Welsh’s book, you had a persistent (but not obvious) sense, throughout the mayhem, that the Ewan McGregor character had the capacity for a stable, respectable life:  it was right that’s what he ended up in.  And Bruce Robertson’s vulnerability does offer some relief.  Filth depends to a considerable extent on a viewer’s enjoying the outrageous behaviour of this misogynist, homophobe and misanthrope – self-serving, back-stabbing, manipulative, abusive in various ways.  But the possibility of his getting what he wants – specifically, a promotion to detective inspector – is unnerving and most of the audience is unlikely to want to see evil run rampant.  The effect of explaining Bruce’s pathological personality and behaviour is almost sentimental, however – even though Jon Baird and James McAvoy provide an effective final sequence.  Bruce’s vividly malevolent spark returns as he grins to camera, kicks away a chair to end his life and there’s a rapid cut to the closing credits (under a good animated sequence, designed by Frater).  What’s more, because Filth turns into an exposure of what’s wrong with Bruce personally, any idea that he’s a paradigm of his time, place and line of work is increasingly obscured.  The first half of the film looks to be describing the rottenness of both the job and the ethos of the Lothian Constabulary.  By the end, Bruce Robertson appears to be the only rotten apple in the barrow and even he has good reason to be screwed up.  It’s as if Jon Baird is anxious to show that, like his main character, he has a heart (although, in doing so, Baird may be reflecting Welsh’s novel faithfully).

    I expected likeable, lightweight James McAvoy as Bruce to be a case of Dr Johnson’s women preachers and dogs walking on their hind legs.  Bruce’s voiceover at the very start didn’t entirely dispel my prejudice; throughout the movie, you’re less shaken by McAvoy’s Bruce than aware of the actor’s intelligence and understanding of how to play him.  But there’s real depth to the characterisation and McAvoy has much more vocal roughness and variety than I expected.  Good as he is, though, his casting naturally reinforces the film’s reassuring tendency and he’s a shade too eager to show Bruce’s emotional misery.  That has the effect of reassuring you further.   Jon Baird and his cinematographer Matthew Jensen have managed to create a visual equivalent of (what I assume to be) the shocking vibrancy of Irvine Welsh’s prose.  The film has plenty of style – enough to give the viewer a slight distance from the violence and vileness on display.  Although it’s not as sophisticated as A Clockwork Orange, this quality of Filth reminded me occasionally of the Kubrick movie – perhaps also because the subway murder by a gang of a Japanese tourist which triggers the main plotline here brings to mind the Droogs’ killing of the tramp. (At the same time, the familiarity of some of the Edinburgh locations – I saw Filth just twenty-four hours after Sunshine on Leith – anchored it in a real world.)  There’s an excellent choice of pop songs on the soundtrack.   Bruce’s wife has a thing about David Soul (you glimpse a framed photograph of him in the family home):  of all the sequences involving Bruce’s fantasies about the departed wife, her life as a prostitute and his tranvestism, wearing her prostitute clothes, the one featuring the now very portly Soul, as one of Bruce’s wife’s punters and singing along to his own ‘Silver Lady’, may be the most bizarre.

    Baird orchestrates the cast very well – they mostly achieve a heightened, somewhat gruelling believability.   Bruce’s male competitors for the DI job, each with his own Achilles heel, are well played by Gary Lewis, Brian McCardie, Emun Elliott and, especially, Jamie Bell.   Imogen Poots is the one and (to Bruce) alarmingly determined female DS in the group and John Sessions is, for once, OK, and appropriately porcine, as the police chief.   Jim Broadbent is exuberantly eccentric as Bruce’s GP/psychiatrist/guilty conscience.  For the second time in a few weeks (after Southcliffe on television) Eddie Marsan and Shirley Henderson play husband and wife.  This time Marsan is a short-sighted – in every sense – accountant whom Bruce knows from the local masonic lodge.  (I assume Bruce’s otherwise puzzling membership of a lodge is meant to underline his professional ambition.)   Henderson is the recipient of the lewd calls which Bruce is making and which he’s then asked to investigate:  as a policeman, he advises playing along with the caller rather than hanging up on him.  Shirley Henderson has a very funny scene in which she obeys instructions and finds that she’s enjoying it.  Also with Joanne Froggatt as the knitting widow, Kate Dickie as one of the other cops’ wives who’s having it off with Bruce, and Shauna Macdonald as Mrs Robertson.

    15 October 2013

     

     

     

  • Fifty Dead Men Walking

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Kari Skogland (2008)

    The show that I saw at the Filmhouse was preceded by a BBC Northern Ireland documentary about Martin McGartland, on whose autobiography Kari Skogland’s picture is based.   McGartland, a Catholic teenager, was recruited by the RUC in 1989 to provide information to their Special Branch about the Provisional IRA, of which he became a member (in the Provos’ Belfast Brigade).   In 1991, McGartland was exposed as an informer; about to be tortured and murdered (the IRA’s standard treatment for informers), he escaped by jumping through an upstairs window.   Seriously injured, he was taken by ambulance – and under RUC surveillance – to hospital.  He subsequently relocated to England, to start a new life in hiding.  The BBC documentary mainly comprises film of McGartland, seen in medium to long shot in his current place of occupation, and an interview with him.  He’s filmed in shadow – you can make out his bespectacled profile but not his full features.  This thirty-minute documentary was made in 1998, when McGartland, who had been frequently moved from one ‘safe’ place to another in England, was about to return to Northern Ireland to appear in a court case in which he was seeking compensation from the RUC.  The judge threw out the case on the grounds that McGartland’s association with a terrorist organisation made him ineligible for compensation.   The documentary ends rather confusingly with a legend on the screen, announcing that – but not explaining how – McGartland did actually receive compensation, a few weeks after the court case ended.   We’re also told that McGartland remains in hiding.

    Fifty Dead Men Walking begins in Canada in 1999 so that, if you’ve just seen the documentary, you’re immediately struck by how much further afield McGartland (Jim Sturgess) has had to go to be safe.  He comes out of his house and looks under his car, checking for bombs.  Moments later, a hooded sniper appears and shoots him through the car window.  Skogland then cuts to Belfast in the late 1980s and, from that point on, the narrative is a straightforward description of McGartland’s life – as a street hustler before he embarks on his dual careers within the Belfast Brigade and working under cover for the RUC.  He has a child and sets up house with a local Catholic girl Lara (Natalie Press).   The climax of the film is McGartland’s escape from his IRA torturers and its immediate aftermath, before Skogland returns to the grievously injured man in the car in Canada.  Text on the screen explains that he survived, what’s happened in the years since 1999, and that McGartland, who’s never seen his family since 1991, still lives in hiding.   We’re told that it’s estimated that, through his work as an informer, McGartland saved the lives of up to 50 people – RUC officers, British soldiers and others.   The film has a good title:  ‘dead man walking’ is the call when a condemned man on death row is being brought through for execution.  The phrase Fifty Dead Men Walking gets across both how close to death were the people whose were saved – and that they may still be around today.

    This remarkable story is certainly worth telling and I’m glad the film’s been made but Fifty Dead Men is not much of a picture.  We’re told at the beginning that some of the characters and events have been changed; if the information on Wikipedia is anything to go by, this is putting it mildly.  For example, the 1999 shooting took place not in Canada but in Whitley Bay:  the transposition seems a crude exaggeration of the impossibility for McGartland of being safe from his IRA pursuers.  Kari Skogland, herself a Canadian, adapted the screenplay from McGartland’s autobiography (which was written with Nicholas Davies), as well as directing.  She sets up the action in Belfast clumsily.  It’s narrated at first by Fergus (Ben Kingsley), the Special Branch officer who recruited and ‘handled’ McGartland, as if the story is going to be told from Fergus’s point of view.  In fact, the narration is used only to get across contextual information – how, for example, the Belfast jobs market was controlled by Protestants to the extent that many young Catholics were either unemployed or, like McGartland, got involved in selling dodgy goods or other kinds of petty crime – and is then dropped immediately.

    Skogland seems to be looking for a semi-documentary feel to the look and movement of the film (shot by Jonathan Freeman and edited by Jim Munro) but it too often comes across like a conventional action thriller in not very convincing disguise.  And because the visuals are hyperkinetic, Skogland never really evokes the horror of living in Northern Ireland during the Troubles by showing ordinary lives going on and terrorist violence literally exploding into them.  The Belfast presented here is hellishly grim – the sulphurous yellow lighting of images is striking but looks contrived – and the violent anarchy seems merely intrinsic to the locale.  One disadvantage of seeing the BBC documentary immediately beforehand was that the main events of McGartland’s career as an informer had already been described in that.  As a result, Skogland’s film, which is short on dramatic and character development in any case, often seems to be doing little more than recording those events.

    Perhaps because McGartland is actually a more controversial character than the film wants to present, Skogland doesn’t really get into exploring his motivation for the double life he came to lead.  Jim Sturgess gets over the character’s street-smart cockiness and charm and is sometimes effective in the way he conceals his feelings from the Provos but a stronger director would have encouraged him to let the camera come to him instead of acting to the camera.   As McGartland’s friend and IRA colleague, Kevin Zegers (who played Felicity Huffman’s son in Transamerica) is always poised between being a good mate and a homicide:  often harder to read than Sturgess, Zegers registers more strongly.  The Belfast accents are often difficult to decipher and this is one of several factors which makes Ben Kingsley – speaking in a completely intelligible northern English accent – too salient in the role of Fergus.   Kingsley is already physically distinctive and magnetic, compared with everyone else we see:  if his wig and clothes were supposed to make him look anonymous, they don’t succeed.    He plays the part scrupulously but you can see him trying to act ordinary in a way that’s a little forced.  Skogland’s screenplay doesn’t help by giving Fergus a tendency to speak in epigrams –  ‘The price of a conscience is death’, ‘We uphold the law and we break the law – in the name of the law’, and so on.    Some of the meetings between McGartland and Fergus look improbably public – especially when Fergus visits the hospital where McGartland’s baby son has just been born, and especially as the main purpose of his presence at the occasion seems to be for Fergus to tell McGartland and us about the toll his line of work has taken on his own family life.  Still, the idea that Fergus, who’s estranged from his own son, has paternal feelings for McGartland comes over effectively enough.  It’s nicely complemented too by the pride taken in McGartland by Mikey (Tom Collins), his IRA father figure.

    12 April 2009

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