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
