The Levelling
Hope Dickson Leach (2016)
C S Lewis complained of the opening lines of The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock that ‘For twenty years I’ve stared my level best to see if evening – any evening – would suggest a patient etherised upon a table; in vain’. The Levelling might not have opened Lewis’s eyes to the merits of T S Eliot’s simile but the Somerset skies in the writer-director Hope Dickson Leach’s first full-length film have a paralysed look – an ironic consequence of the turbulent weather which brought floods to the Somerset Levels in early 2014. The sense of paralysis reflects the hopeless economic plight of the Cattos, the local farming family at the centre of The Levelling; and the flooding that has ruined cow pasture isn’t the only threat to their livelihood. The skyscape is also an expression of numbing bereavement – and the film’s title refers to death as well as geography.
Clover Catto (Ellie Kendrick), a veterinary medicine student who now lives away from home, returns to the farm after receiving the shocking news of her brother Harry’s sudden death. It seems that Clover and Harry’s mother died some time ago, and Clover gets on badly with their father Aubrey (David Troughton). For most of the film, she calls him by his forename rather than dad. (By coincidence, this also brings C S Lewis to mind: Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Trader calls his parents Harold and Alberta, though this is less an indication of emotional estrangement than an example of pernicious (to Lewis) progressivism.) Clover learns that Harry, who was in the process of taking over the running of the farm from Aubrey, shot himself – after getting drunk at a party at the farm and engaging, with other young men there, in some kind of firewalking ritual. Her brother’s friend James (Jack Holden), who also participated, describes these events to Clover. James also tells her that Harry was seen arguing heatedly with Aubrey shortly before he died. The Levelling becomes a whydunnit, as well as an exploration of the hostility between Clover and her father.
The film begins with shots of the nighttime firewalking. (These are the audience’s only glimpses of Harry (Joe Blakemore).) The combination of darkness, flickering lights and bellowing noise in this preface is in stark contrast to the look and sound of virtually all that follows. Her limited budget hasn’t prevented Hope Dickson Leach, with the help of her cinematographer Nanu Segal and production designer Sarah Finlay, from creating sustained atmosphere. The muddy dilapidation of the farm and the bleak landscape beyond it are eloquent. It would be hard to argue that The Levelling doesn’t succeed in doing what it sets out to do. Yet it’s determinedly monotonous and, even allowing for the Cattos’ unhappy situation, excessively miserable. It’s a piece whose strength rests on a shaky assumption that plenty of people seem nevertheless prepared to accept: that relentless gloom is tantamount to depth.
here is one unpredictable element. It seems increasingly likely that the father will follow his son’s example and shoot himself: the audience shares Clover’s repeated, anxious alertness to this probability. In the event, Aubrey survives but the final scene turns out predictable in other ways. Hearing gunshot, Clover runs to a field to find Aubrey culling his cattle one by one. There’s a sudden change in the weather, meteorological and emotional. The lowering, static heavens open; the girl desperately cries out ‘Daddy, Daddy!’ She wrests the gun from Aubrey. They embrace and sink together to the ground, muddying the best clothes they’d put on for Harry’s funeral. The acting of Ellie Kendrick (so good in the title role in the BBC adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank back in 2009) reflects the limitations of the film as a whole. Kendrick holds attention, though; what’s more, the camera doesn’t catch her doing anything false, however close it moves in on Clover. David Troughton is excellent. He’s not only remarkably nuanced but brings humour to the character of Aubrey. That’s a quality otherwise absent from Hope Dickson Leach’s accomplished debut feature.
7 June 2017