Rowan Joffe (2010)
Neds and this in the space of five days: the best and worst of British film-making in rapid succession. The Boulting brothers’ 1947 version of Brighton Rock, with Richard Attenborough as Pinkie Brown and a screenplay by Graham Greene and Terence Rattigan, is good enough to be a hard act to follow. The solution seized upon by the director Rowan Joffe, who also did the screenplay, is to ‘update’ the material. The new film is set in 1964, Greene’s Brighton racecourse gangs are replaced by mods and rockers, a television set is reporting political debate about capital punishment, and Ida Arnold mentions the atom bomb and the pill. Aside from the sets and clothes, this is about how far and deep the recasting of the novel, published in 1938, and the first screenplay goes. As for capturing the Catholic dimension, Joffe has Rose praying in a vast, empty church in the shadow of vast Daliesque Christ, and there’s some vaguely religious chanting worked into Martin Phipps’s ludicrous score. Elsewhere, the music, with its drum rolls, rippling rise and fall and booming ominousness, is like a bizarre pastiche of Bernard Herrmann’s score for Taxi Diver crossed with Sibelius.
I can’t remember when I last saw a film where it was so immediately and dismayingly obvious what you were in for. Having said that, this Brighton Rock is such an aberration that for a little while I couldn’t believe what I was seeing and wondered if Joffe was aiming for a postmodern effect. There are times when his picture seems less like a remake of Brighton Rock than an account of film people working out how to do a remake. Watching Andy Serkis as the gang boss Colleoni (which sounds like Corleone – it might have been worth updating this name), you think there must be more to this than meets the eye. All that actually meets the eye is Serkis laboriously working out how he’s going to read a line or execute the holding of a cigar or a coffee cup. (He takes so long the cigar must have gone out and the coffee cold in the meantime.) Are the utterly unvarying pace throughout and the vice-like sombreness meant to convey Pinkie’s predestination (or something)? Is it simply to differentiate his version from the Boultings’ that Joffe presents a depopulated Brighton in which there’s no contrast between its energetic public face and the gangsters’ underworld? The film was shot in Brighton and Eastbourne but it looks to be taking place in the Coastal Resort of Lost Souls.
In Sam Riley, Britain may have found its own Leonardo DiCaprio (they share, as well as limited talents, a slight facial resemblance). As Pinkie, Riley is so monotonously inexpressive that he’s almost compelling: you look harder and harder at him – you think there must be something there, but you’re wrong. Or, at least, all that comes through is Riley’s awareness that he’s playing a soul on his way to hell. He misses out entirely on any suggestion that Pinkie might have divided feelings. When his devoted Rose says, ‘You look worried, Pinkie’, you know she must be imagining things. In all the scenes featuring Riley, the pauses between lines are vast stretches of emptiness: there’s nothing going on between him and anyone else (I expect Riley’s admirers will explain that this is because Pinkie’s a psychopath). Andrea Riseborough as Rose deserves respect and pity: this is a good actress with an impossible task. What could make Rose swear eternal loyalty to a boy as dully charmless as Riley’s Pinkie, who never gives her any kind of a good time? Yet Riseborough is skilfully sympathetic in suggesting a girl who’s a bit thick but at least as determined. Her shifts between looking plain and pretty hold your attention.
On the whole, though, Rowan Joffe pays so much attention to artifical, emphatic lighting of attention-seeking images (shot by John Mathieson, much of the film is photography rather than cinematography) that he seems to ignore the cast. The unchanging mood and the metronomic pacing turn perfectly good actors like Phil Davis and Maurice Roeves into obvious, uninteresting ones, and Steve Evets is saddled with an awfully crude bit as Rose’s unloving, mercenary father. I’m strongly prejudiced in favour of Sean Harris but I do think he is one of the best things in the film: his Hale combines menace with neediness in an arresting way. (Harris also has the advantage of being killed off early.) There are moments when you think Joffe forgot to tell John Hurt, as Ida’s pal Phil Corkery, that the source material had been moved on a quarter-century but Hurt is at least entertaining. Thank goodness, though, for Helen Mirren. You can understand why she was attracted to playing Ida Arnold and she does it with panache. The unnuanced torpidity of most of what’s going on around her may give Mirren’s playing the appearance of overacting but I don’t think it is. The earthy, used glamour in her presence and bearing, and the practical moral urgency, are right and have substance, and Mirren’s ability to change the emotional temperature of a scene has never been more desperately needed. (The dialogues between Mirren and Riseborough and the one short exchange between Riseborough and Sean Harris are the only moments of dramatic life in the whole film.)
Once Pinkie has fallen to his bloody, broken death (off a cliff which the characters seem to spend an awful lot of time on the edge of), I must have relaxed, knowing the end was nigh. I couldn’t stop laughing in the last few minutes, especially during the closing sequence in the home for unmarried mothers where Rose ends up, pregnant with Pinkie’s child. Joffe retains the startlingly effective end of the 1947 film but he prepares for it very (and laughably) slowly. A parcel arrives for one of the inmates and the others run excitedly to her bed. The place is run by nuns – or a nun anyway, who commands the girls, ‘Get back to your beds!’ (The choreography of their movement and expressions is like something out of a silent movie; the mute chorus of inane-looking girls who work with Rose in the teashop that Ida manages aren’t much better.) It turns out that inside the fascinating parcel is a small gramophone. Whoever sent this must have had a sick sense of humour – the recipient’s circumstances are hardly conducive to playing records – but they must have known it would come in handy. It’s just what Rose needed to hear the disc she persuaded Pinkie to record in the booth on the Brighton sea front. The year is young but Brighton Rock has staked a strong early claim to be the worst picture of 2011.
5 February 2011
