Mat Whitecross (2010)
Andy Serkis is fantastic as Ian Dury in Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll. It’s a marvellous impersonation but the true marvel is how quickly you stop admiring it as an impersonation. The raw, abysmal hoarseness of Dury’s voice – whether speaking or singing – is completely absorbed. Serkis also seems to have got inside Dury’s head. The actor understands what language meant to Ian Dury and expresses his verbal flair and eccentricity with wonderful variety: you see how words are being used as defence or attack, how the original turns of phrase that keep pouring out can delight Dury or make him feel trapped. You completely believe in Dury’s relationships with the two women in his life – his wife Betty, from whom he’s separated, and his girlfriend Denise. Serkis gets you to see how impossible Dury makes these relationships but how indispensable to him they both are. Serkis doesn’t naturally resemble Dury physically to any great extent but what he did in training for the part has yielded amazing results – not just a convincingly lop-sided walk but a convincingly lop-sided musculature. When he’s in make-up Serkis looks more conventionally clown-like than Dury, with his big, square-jawed, belligerent head, did. But the look is still effective – and Serkis’s face seems peculiarly naked without the make-up. I’ve not liked Andy Serkis in either of his television roles that have attracted attention in the last few years. He was too conventionally menacing as Ian Brady in Longford and disastrous as Rigaud in Little Dorrit. (He seemed to construct the character’s sinister qualities, including an exotic accent, so carefully that Rigaud slowed down every scene he was in, and became less scary than boring.) His acting in Sex & Drugs was a revelation to me.
I heard Serkis’s interview with Francine Stock on Radio 4’s The Film Programme the other week and Sally watched him talking on television a few days ago. In the radio interview, Serkis explained how much he’d always admired Dury and the shattering effect of meeting him, an occasion on which Dury was ‘really obnoxious’. On television, Serkis talked about Dury’s family insisting on a ‘warts and all’ portrait in the film. A problem with Sex & Drugs is that Mat Whitecross and the screenwriter Paul Viragh have come up with a portrait that’s all warts. Leaving the theatre, I caught snatches of a youngish couple’s conversation. (They were probably too young to remember much of Ian Dury, who died in 2000 at the age of fifty-seven.) The girl found the Dury of Sex & Drugs ‘totally horrible’, and thought it was impossible to have any sympathy at all for him. That last bit surprises me, given what Serkis is like in the role, but her reaction is still understandable.
Mat Whitecross’s evident determination to avoid biopic conventions makes matters worse in this respect. Although the themes emerge clearly enough, the first hour of the picture is a collage of scenes and styles (including jolly titles and other animated sequences designed by Peter Blake, who taught Dury at the Royal College of Art in the 1960s). This fragmentation works well enough in suggesting the confusions of Dury’s life – the unsettling persistence of childhood traumas, a sense of doing a performance offstage as well as on, an inability to get a coherent grip on things (although Dury onstage occasionally addresses the audience as if standing outside and commenting on his life). As things get bleaker, when Dury has made the big time but is struggling to write and to repeat the success he enjoyed in the late 1970s, a more familiar biopic narrative sets in. It’s as though Whitecross can live with this if events take a sufficiently gloomy turn. And this avoidance of the superficial and obvious elements of biopic doesn’t go that deep. In the end, Whitecross and Viragh fall back on psychological simplification: Sex & Drugs seems to say that Ian Dury’s angry, roiling psyche was almost entirely shaped by the trauma of polio and the afterlife it imposed on him.
I would have preferred more of the songs and watching Andy Serkis perform them: you’re made all the more aware of this deprivation at the very end, when he gets to do ‘Reasons To Be Cheerful, Part 3’, in its entirety, alongside the closing credits. It’s a cliché in biopics of famous performers that the protagonist, no matter how disastrous their affairs may be in the real world, is transformed on stage. When it’s fully satisfying, this kind of transformation has two aspects: it alters the way we see the subject of the story; and gives us a sense of how differently they see the world, and feel about themselves, during performance. Perhaps Whitecross wants to make it tough for us by limiting the opportunities for us to capitulate to Dury as a beguiling showman, by insisting that we never lose sight of the fact that he was a nightmare to live with. But that’s not actually what’s achieved by stinting on the performance sequences, and splintering or distracting fantastically from what few there are (like the underwater rendition of Dury’s greatest song, ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’). There’s enough of these sequences for us to see that this is a charismatic performer but not enough for us to understand what performing meant to him. (There was a not dissimilar problem with the La vie en rose, although for a different reason. Whenever Edith Piaf approached the footlights, something bad had just happened in her life or she was destined to collapse halfway through a number. You not only couldn’t see what she got out of performing; you wondered why she would ever want to go back on stage.)
Ian Dury was, in his own words (in the film), a ‘brilliant swimmer’ before he was struck down with polio, which he believed he contracted in a Southend swimming baths, at the age of seven. After the period of hospitalisation that followed, he attended a school-cum-hospital for disabled children. Except for the frustrating reduction of ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’, variations on the theme of water in Sex & Drugs are worked obviously but effectively. Where the young child Dury was once in his element becomes a medium for floundering or even drowning in, and his son Baxter is neurotically afraid of diving in and going under. (Whitecross and Viragh can’t seem to decide how big a character in the story they want Baxter Dury to be: there are times when he seems to be the central consciousness – as if we were seeing the life of his father filtered through Baxter’s memory and imagination – before reverting to an important but supporting role.) There’s also a leitmotif of Dury watching the climax to Spartacus. This is eventually linked with the controversy surrounding Dury’s single ‘Spasticus Autisticus’, which he wrote virtually in protest at the International Year of the Disabled in 1981, and involves a fantasy of the massed ranks of Dury’s disabled schoolboy contemporaries echoing the I-am-Spartacus chorus at the end of the Kubrick film. (The best bit in all this is when we realise Dury knows the Dalton Trumbo script off by heart. There’s a close-up of Kirk Douglas – his lips move but Dury’s voice comes out.)
Some of the scenes aren’t staged as well as they might be. When Dury trashes a recording studio and the studio manager, not unreasonably, goes ballistic, a spectacular brawl ensues. This seems to be an example of Dury’s appalling, loco behaviour – as such, it needs to contrast with the couple of earlier sequences in which fights involving Kilburn & the High Roads or the Blockheads break out. Instead, it comes over as just another example of wild-men-of-rock bellicose high jinks. When Dury storms out of a radio interview about ‘Spasticus Autisticus’, the row he has all the way down the corridor with the mild-mannered head of a disabled persons’ charity is crudely done. He then visits his injured wife in hospital, she asks him (again) for a divorce and this time Dury surrenders (‘OK, you’re fired’). Betty’s long-time partner Clive appears and she immediately wanders out of view with him: the effect, in what appears to be a realistic sequence, is too pat. Some of the best moments are when Whitecross injects an unrealistic flourish into the predominantly conventional narrative he’s settled into by this point. Dury goes to speak to a group of disabled kids at his old school. They’re mostly silent when the teacher encourages them to ask questions, then we hear a voice say ‘Do you believe in God?’ and see that the question is from Dury’s younger self, who’s sitting among the other children and who continues to probe the man he’s become.
Paul Viragh’s dialogue is well written and Sex & Drugs is mostly very well acted. Naomie Harris has a real emotional transparency and range as Denise. Olivia Williams, as Betty, sometimes seems like a lovingly exasperated nursery teacher, which is fair enough given what her husband can be like. Luke Evans does well in the pretty thankless role of Betty’s partner Clive. The worryingly skinny Bill Milner is convincing as Baxter; and there’s a connection between Serkis’s Dury and the well-spoken boy Ian, played by Wesley Nelson. Ralph Ineson is all right as a drug-dependent friend of Dury’s although he seems less comfortable acting serious than with comedy. Toby Jones, as the adult polio-sufferer in charge of Dury’s group at school, is a little too theatrically cruel and Michael Maloney is obvious as the head of the charity. I liked Mackenzie Crook as the pianist in Kilburn & the High Roads. In an even smaller role, Noel Clarke is strong as the enraged studio manager. I didn’t catch the name of the sensitive actress who plays the teacher whose class Dury goes to talk to. Ray Winstone too has only a cameo, as Ian’s father, but his presence is so strong that it stays in the film the way that Bill Dury stays in his son’s memory.
What Andy Serkis does here made me think (not for the first time) how overpraised the lip-synching Jamie Foxx was in Ray. Ian Dury didn’t have either the voice or the international standing of Ray Charles and it’s unlikely that Serkis will be rewarded (next year) with an Oscar for his work in Sex & Drugs. He has, though, already been nominated for a BAFTA for Best Actor. BAFTA often seems torn between loyalty to home-grown talent and trying to second-guess the Oscar voters. Without having yet seen Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart, I think this is an instance where BAFTA should hold its nationalistic nerve and give Serkis his due[1].
25 January 2010
[1] Postscript: In a worst-of-both-worlds result, BAFTA gave the prize to another Brit, Colin Firth, for A Single Man.
