Andrea Arnold (2009)
When a film is set on an Essex council estate and a white horse appears, chained up on a patch of waste ground, it’s a safe bet that horse will be symbolic. Twice, in the early stages of Andrea Arnold’s new film, the protagonist, Mia, tries unsuccessfully to free this horse; near the end of the picture, she learns from her would-be boyfriend Kyle that the animal is dead: ‘She got sick and had to be shot … she was sixteen – she’d had her time’. It’s not just the appearance of the aging mare that evokes They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? The only possible way out of Great Depression poverty for the characters in the Horace McCoy novel (and the screen adaptation, directed by Sydney Pollack) is success in a marathon dance contest. In Fish Tank, Mia – who’s fifteen going on sixteen (the same age as the horse and with, it seems, little more future) – wants to be a hip-hop dancer. When she sees a notice ‘Female Dancers Wanted’, she sends in an audition tape. That eventually comes to nothing but, as she prepares to leave home at the end of the film, Mia, her mother Joanne and younger sister Tyler – who’ve done nothing but abuse each other up to this point – have a brief moment of unity: they start to move together to ‘Life’s a Bitch’ by Nas. The title promises a study of claustrophobia but the ichthyoid metaphor is both too limiting and rather clashes with one of the most startling moments in the film – when Joanne’s latest boyfriend, Connor, takes her and her daughters for a drive, catches a live fish in a lake and sticks a cane down its gullet to kill it. The creature would have been safer in an aquarium than it was in fresh water. Perhaps Andrea Arnold should have called the picture ‘Vivarium’ – ‘A place, especially an indoor enclosure, for keeping and raising living animals and plants under natural conditions for observation or research’ (according to freedictionary.com).
There was a lot to like about Arnold’s first feature Red Road – and so a lot to look forward to in what she did next. Fish Tank, although compelling and well acted, is a bit of a disappointment. Arnold examines her characters’ lives – which are grim, except for the odd moment of hedonistic relief – minutely and, in terms of their routine details and structure, believably but her field of vision is narrow. There are resonant images – of the sexually awakening Mia glimpsing things through half-open doors or steamed up windows, of trees and skies beyond the blocks of flats, of a heart-shaped balloon flying above them at great speed (the final shot). But there’s not enough texture to the film to prevent these images from sticking out as strategically placed visual highlights. The same is true of key bits like that concluding dance of the mother and her daughters: it seems artificially imposed and its point is too explicit. There’s nothing surprising in the story and it feels too easy to justify that on the grounds that Mia’s social circumstances mean that her life is predetermined.
Although Arnold is praised for her unflinching realism, it’s striking that, as in Red Road, she eventually pulls back from the bleak conclusion towards which her story seems to be heading. When Connor has had sex with Mia and promptly walked out on Joanne, Mia goes on foot to his home in Tilbury; he opens the door then urgently gets her off the premises and drives her back to the local train station. When Mia goes back a second time, no one answers the door. Compared with her own home, it’s a decent house with a back garden and Mia breaks in from the back. Once she’s inside, her discovery – from scarves and jewellery, toys, photographs – that Connor has a wife and a daughter capsizes Mia’s desire for him, both as a lover and a father. She urinates on the carpet. When the family returns home, Mia exits the way that she entered, lies in wait for Connor’s child, Keira, and abducts her. There’s a distressing cross-country chase – Mia’s being upset by Keira’s angry resistance is almost as upsetting as the child’s bewilderment and alarm – which ends on the edge of estuary waters and with Keira falling in and disappearing from view. This is as far as Arnold is prepared to go. We know from the earlier sequence at the lake that Mia can’t swim but she is usefully carrying a tree branch which she now uses to get Keira out of the water. She then returns the child home.
Mia’s escape to Cardiff with Kyle at the end of Fish Tank is less unconvincing than the phony upbeat resolution that marred Red Road but, considering how little happens in this new film (the plot is simpler than that of Red Road), Arnold’s screenplay is often awkward and evasive. The character of Kyle is introduced very clumsily. When Mia tries to break their horse’s chain, Kyle and his elder brother physically threaten her. From that point onwards, Kyle becomes a nice, harmless boy and the brother conveniently disappears from the scene. There’s no attempt to explain what Connor’s wife thinks he’s doing during the time he’s living at Joanne’s. When Keira is back home and Mia is leaving the scene of her crime, Connor drives after her, then chases her across a field, then belts her and then drives off. As an illustration of his complete rejection of her, the moment is dramatically effective; yet, while we can see that Connor, for reasons of self-protection, might not pursue with the police the break-in at his home and his child’s disappearance, it’s incredible that his wife would turn an equally blind eye and that he can draw a line under what’s happened. It comes as a surprise that, the day after the abduction, Mia goes ahead with attending the dance audition to which she’s been called. As soon as we see what kind of performance the people hiring dancers are after, it becomes hard to credit that Mia would have got a call on the basis of the tape she sent in. You could believe she might have turned up and left once she saw the other auditions and the way the girls were (un)dressed. It makes no sense, except as a dramatic flourish, that she gets up on stage, has her performance track (‘California Dreamin’ by Bobby Womack) start, and then walk outs.
In the main role, Katie Jarvis is very good – even though she’s distinctive in a way that makes it obvious from the start that Mia is a cut above her surroundings and other girls on the estate (and a bit puzzling that no one there seems to think she’s anything to look at). In the course of the film, Jarvis ages convincingly – emotionally and physically (Arnold dresses and photographs her so that the budding breasts become more noticeable). I’ve not yet seen Hunger and Michael Fassbender isn’t much more than an amusingly clipped English accent in Inglourious Basterds but he’s impressive here: as soon as he appears, he manages to suggest a man with a life elsewhere. Connor is very aware of his good looks and flirts blatantly with Mia before he eventually has sex with her. She’s fascinated by him whether she sees him wearing only his boxer shorts or looking smart in his work clothes (he’s a security guard at Wickes in Barking). There’s considerable tension in the exchanges between them: you know that the man is exploiting the child; at the same time, you can feel that what she is experiencing with Connor is providing Mia with sensual excitement that’s new and confusing but also life-enhancing. Kierston Wareing is excellent as Joanne: as Mia gets older, her mother – living for drinking and lovemaking with Connor and devastated when he walks out – becomes more helplessly childish. And Arnold strikes gold with the two youngest performers: Rebecca Griffiths is completely convincing as Mia’s kid sister Tyler – who’s already developed a necessary (brittle) shell of foul-mouthed aggressiveness; in the smaller role of Keira, Sydney Mary Nash has a really expressive blend of fear and wilful toughness. Harry Treadaway does better than might reasonably be expected with the weak role of Kyle. The family’s Staffordshire bull terrier – the well-named Tennents – makes a strong showing too.
20 September 2009
