Neds
Peter Mullan (2010)
Neds has its faults but it’s the most personal and exciting new British film I’ve seen since This is England (2006). It’s unusual in that its central theme – juvenile delinquency in mid-1970s Glasgow – leads you to expect a sober, social realist treatment but Peter Mullan, who also wrote the screenplay, gradually introduces fantastic and poetic elements. The piece’s emotional coherence and grip are sustained and unarguable even if the prevailing naturalistic style is a double-edged sword. Its negative effect is to make the implausibilities and elisions in the storytelling more problematic. The teenage protagonist John McGill is so anxious to be promoted in his first year at secondary school that he can’t conceal his impatience to get into the top class next door (he’s on his feet as soon as the teacher announces the exam results). He’s sufficiently fearless to stand outside reading a book, not ostentatiously but visible to the other boys, at the end of his first term. His rejection by Julian (or rather by Julian’s snobby mother), the middle-class boy he makes friends with at a summer school eighteen months later, just isn’t enough to explain John’s wholesale metamorphosis into a school-hating gangster by day one of the next autumn term. (It’s not clear either why John has no friends from his own school – clever, working-class kids like himself.) Is he playing truant throughout the period during which he maims another boy, holds a bus driver at knifepoint, and hides out at the top of a tower block? Is John meant to be typical or exceptional? Mullan is a bit slippery around this last, essential question but, by the end of Neds (short for ‘non-educated delinquents’), he’s transcended realism or, at least, created intentionally unrealistic bits which eclipse the rest. At the same time, the documentary context and Conor McCarron’s portrait of John give the film’s poetry a humanly real grounding.
Neds begins when John is about to leave primary school as the top pupil in his year. His mother, his aunt (visiting from America, to where she emigrated) and his younger sister are all there, happily applauding and taking photographs. A scruffy kid in a parka briefly spoils the sunny moment, spitting threats and expletives into John’s ear (about what he can expect when he moves to secondary school). John, played at this stage by Gregg Forrest, is so startled by this gatecrasher – as if he were from another planet – that it comes as a shock when we learn more about John’s home life. His toolmaker father (played by Mullan) is a violent drunk; his elder brother, Benny (Joe Szula), has been expelled from school and in trouble with the law. It’s thanks to Benny that, when John starts at secondary school, he’s put in form 1A2 rather than 1A1. When he protests to the headmaster, John is told that he needs first to prove he’s different from his brother. In a Sight and Sound interview with Demetrios Matheou, Mullan denies there’s much autobiography in Neds but when he says it’s ’easily 90 per cent fiction’ he can only mean in terms of actual events in the film. Neds starts in the summer of 1972 when John is eleven; Mullan was born in Glasgow in 1961. He once described his father as ‘one of those people who come into a room with the smell of death, and suck the life out of it’, and acknowledges in the S&S piece that ‘My father did say those things, and do those things’ that Mr McGill does in the film (which is dedicated to Christopher Mullan, I assume Peter’s younger brother, who died in 2010).
Mullan also says in the S&S interview that initially:
‘I wanted to look at the nature of tribalism, education, the role of family, the church … But as I was writing, I realised it was less about issues and more experiential. This is about adolescence. This isn’t about gang, tribe, family, church – they’re there, but it’s really about the travails of youth and what happens between prepubescent and post-pubescent worlds.’
One of the most impressive things about Neds is how these elements are held in a balanced, gripping tension. Mullan dramatises the anthropology very well: the boys compete with each other and perform to the girls. Their progress towards adulthood involves status symbols both conventional and in the form of dangerous weapons, as when John’s stopped by three lads in a car and the one in the passenger seat aims a crossbow at him. The film is mainly about men: except for the crude caricature that is Julian’s mother, the women – John’s mother (Louise Goodall) and aunt (Marianna Palka) and sister (Mhairi Anderson) – are respectable and responsible, but pretty helpless in the face of the menfolk’s viciousness and violence. (The most startling thing we get from the distaff side is the gruesome poem about worms which John’s sister Elizabeth performs to camera – but she then claims that John taught it to her.) The girls who hang out with the boys in the gang are lippy but seem to see themselves as consorts. John and his brother are their father’s sons.
But there are back-to-the-womb images too. John repeatedly retreats into warmth and darkness – watching television with the curtains drawn (which annoys his mother no end), standing in shadow behind his bedroom window, enjoying a private meal of stolen bread and milk when he’s in hiding up in the tower block. The corporal punishment in John’s Catholic school is eventually shocking because it’s so routine. Mullan is obviously agin it but he doesn’t take the obvious route of simply suggesting that the boys’ violent tendencies are a natural consequence of the education they’re getting. He recognises that the ways the social and institutional structures operate aren’t conducive to moral or physical well-being. But, as noted in the good piece on the film by Jonathan McCalmont that I read online[1], we’re always aware in Conor McCarron’s portrait of John that he knows he’s making a choice. The intelligence that might seem to be going to waste at least allows John to retain a sharp awareness of – and a conscience about – what he’s doing.
Perhaps it’s because Mullan is primarily interested in distilling adolescence that Neds is imprecise about the kids’ ages. This isn’t a problem with most of the gang members – the fact they could be anything between fourteen and twenty makes a point – but it matters more with John himself because Mullan follows his secondary school career so closely. John turns from Gregg Forrest into Conor McCarron at the end of his second year, when he can’t be more than thirteen: the heavy-set McCarron (who’s actually seventeen) looks at least three years older, already on the way to Ray Winstone look-alikeness. You still believe, though, that the more emotionally open Forrest becomes McCarron, who seems to thicken out physically and to become spiritually internalised and shut off in proportion to John’s increasing need to be able to look after himself. Compared with the freedom and rawness of the kids, some of the grown ups’ playing seems forced and mediocre – redolent of seventies television acting (the Scottish strain of which had a particularly and deservedly low reputation). Mullan says in S&S he wanted this but it seems aberrant – there’s no other sense in which Neds seems like a television product of its time. But he also says that he encouraged the adult actors to go over the top and this does pay dividends – in his own performance and those of Gary Lewis and Steven Robertson as two of John’s teachers. Mullan is physically entirely convincing as the individual that is Mr McGill but he plays the role in a way that goes deeper, makes the character essential and archetypal. Lewis and the eccentric Robertson are similarly more expressive thanks to the intensity of their performances.
The deep and deeply self-protective sarcasm of these two masters – the young Latin teacher Bonetti (Robertson) and the older man Russell (Lewis), watching out for latecomers on John’s first day in the senior school – is extremely convincing. When Bonetti hands back the first piece of work he’s given to the class of eleven year olds, he explains that most of the boys are likely to feel they’ve done rather well if they assume their mark is out of ten but that in fact it’s a percentage mark. The shining exception is John, who’s scored one hundred. Bonetti – to pre-empt the other boys deriding John as a swot – makes him stand on his desk. There’s a fine ambiguity in this: John is both a cut above and a figure of fun. The teacher’s feelings in making an example of him are confused too – he wants to put the rest of their class in their place but he doesn’t want to risk alienating them (a recurring theme of Neds is that there’s safety in numbers). Some other boys see Russell on sentry duty and hurry themselves up: John takes his time and Russell sarcastically observes how exhausted he must be and offers him a piggyback into the building. Russell then bangs his load hard against the doors several times before deciding that he can’t carry John further. Laborious but incandescent irony is Russell’s normal mode of communication: when he breaks up a knife fight in the toilets and yells at five lads that they’re all expelled, the moment is cathartic for him; when one of the boys then says he’s been stabbed, Russell is bewildered – he doesn’t know where to go next. The scene in the Latin class two years after the first is even better, and exposes Bonetti’s terrible vulnerability, as John refuses to give the right answer the teacher knows that he knows, and forces Bonetti to use the leather strap. John is so physically intimidating next to the lanky, goofy Bonetti that it’s the teacher you fear for, even as he’s handing out corporal punishment.
After he’s been cut off by Julian’s mother, John throws fireworks through the front window of the posh house – a terrifying teatime interruption. When he’s desperate to find £15 as bail for Benny, he holds a bus driver at knifepoint to get the cash. As John falls from grace (the religious sense is not irrelevant), Mullan begins to develop a psychic landscape in conjunction with the physical one. We see John get back on the same bus he stole the cash from; we clock the registration number and so, presumably, does he. He goes upstairs where he finds Julian and a schoolfriend (just about the only non-white face we see throughout) and sits behind, kicking and goading them. The bus driver recognises John, who has to make a quick exit pursued by police. Although we assume these events are happening in reality, they have a strong metaphorical aspect too – the bus is the locus of misdeeds and resentments preying on John’s mind. But nothing prepares you for the most remarkable sequence in Neds.
John, after his eviction from home for an attack on his father and his high-rise exile, is back to earth, exhausted and hungry. In the darkness of a local park, he blows into an empty crisp bag. He’s propped up against a statue of Christ; he looks the statue in the eye and starts being cheeky to it. A bit of metal drops onto John, then another: he’s being assailed by a disintegrating crown of thorns – like miniature knives. Then Jesus (Sam Hayman) himself comes down from the cross and embraces John before giving him a right hook – and coming off worse in the fight that ensues. The battle with Christ, accompanied by The New Seekers’ ‘You Won’t Find Another Fool Like Me’, works brilliantly both as a Catholic boy’s hallucinations and as a dream that’s merely a jumble of the events of the day just ended. (The day included, as well as the quota of violence, John’s taking refuge in a room where a couple of twenty-something Christians were leading assorted waifs and strays in a rendition of ‘He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands’). Mullan then cuts to next morning; as John wakes up, he finds his father standing there, his face bearing the stigmata of John’s assault with a frying pan (which led to his being chucked out by his mother). This appearance could just as easily be a fantasy as the battle with Christ but it’s true – and the earthly father is offering forgiveness, inviting John to come home because his mother’s worried sick about him.
Back at home, over an unusual, becalmed family tea, John’s father asks his son to ‘finish me off’. (In a rare outburst of consideration for the women in the family, he waits until his wife’s out of the room – she’s on the phone to Benny, who has left town – and asks his daughter to cover her ears before he makes this request of his son.) John prepares to grant his father’s wish: he attaches a long knife to each of his wrists and goes to meet his maker. His father tells him to come back when he’s asleep. John leaves the house and goes to find his gang colleagues, resulting in a confrontation which is scary and ends in physical wounds for them and for him. John returns home and finds his father sleeping: he launches himself on the bed but he can’t do the deed. The image of the son lying against his barely conscious father is ‘altogether extraordinary’ – Pauline Kael’s description of the ‘Pietà’ moment in Cries and Whispers, with which this stands comparison. Catholics tend to assume (wrongly) they have a monopoly on guilty conscience: Mullan avoids overdoing the religious aspects of the material while still making them seem powerfully inherent. In both his incarnations, John has a prominent mole below his left ear. I assume it’s real for one of the boys playing him and make-up for the other but the mole becomes a distinguishing mark, almost the mark of Cain.
John’s headmaster, assured by the boys mother that her son’s ‘turned over a new leaf’, agrees to take him back into the school but he’s demoted to 3R – the remedial class: here Mullan strays too far from what’s credible, perhaps because he’s thinking ahead to how he’s going to end the film. John is put in the bottom class so that the camera can linger on the faces of kids with learning disabilities around him, and the director can score relatively cheap points. The form master wants to get on with reading his newspaper rather than teaching and later reprimands John for smuggling a book into a metalwork lesson. Yet one of the kids in 3R is a more disturbing presence: Canta (Gary Milligan) is brain damaged – the result of when John thumped him on the head with a gravestone. In the last few minutes of Neds, John and his new classmates are taken on a trip to a local safari park and the teachers manage to get their party stranded out of bounds, where the most dangerous animal inhabitants of the place roam free, and out of petrol. The safari park people can’t get all the party out in one vehicle – two will have to stay behind and be picked up later, and they are John and Canta. After a while John realises, ‘They’re not coming back for us’. The symbolism of the boys’ plight – stranded and at the mercy of wild beasts – is too obviously conceived. But the final image – of John, accompanied by his guilty burden Canta, walking unharmed past the lions – is very affecting.
John first comes by a knife at school, when he’s locked himself in a cubicle while a fight is going on in the toilets and the weapon gets thrown under the cubicle door. Here again, Mullan creates a moment which achieves a double meaning: on a realistic level, it’s an accident; on a symbolic level, it’s inevitable in the world that John inhabits. Some of the violence in the film is slashing but the most shocking instances of it are brutally blunt: John’s attacks with the gravestone and the frying pan imply that he wants to obliterate Canta and his father. The 1970s pop cultural details, at their best, seem perfectly random but would have been chosen only by someone who remembers them. On the soundtrack there’s Wizzard, Sweet, The New Seekers (and, with more obvious irony, The Sensational Alex Harvey Band’s cover of ‘Cheek to Cheek’ and Morecambe and Wise’s ‘Bring Me Sunshine’). On the television, there’s Hector’s House and, best of all, the oft-repeated The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe with its dubbed, dislocated narrator. In a superb reprise of that programme’s lovely, soaring theme music, Mullan has John, isolated at the top of the tower block, looking out over Glasgow below for signs of human life, his newspaper turned into a hat and a telescope. (In another fine image in this part of the film, John, from a God’s-eye view, watches the police chasing after his gang colleagues in a kind of baffling, insect choreography.) Complementing the seventies soundtrack is the impressive score by Craig Armstrong, which is both ominous and plangent. I thought at first I was going to struggle to work out what the kids were saying (the film would surely have to be subtitled if it got a release outside this country) but this doesn’t prove to be a hindrance. What you don’t pick up in the dialogue gets across a sense of the lives on the screen being to some extent impenetrable.
31 January 2011
[1] http://ruthlessculture.com/2011/01/27/neds-2010-dont-let-you-get-the-best-of-you/