Simon Fellows (2018)
As the title suggests, the geographical setting is Pennsylvania. According to the EIFF[1] website, the moral setting is ‘Trump’s America’ and Simon Fellows’s thriller ‘references many issues faced by the US under the current regime’. Steel Country actually looks to be taking place at the tail end of the Obama presidency – unless the small town in which the events occur is such a sleepy backwater it can’t summon the energy to take down the ‘Vote Trump/Pence’ election banners that appear in the opening titles sequence. It would be nice to see those banners as an acute comment on the continuation of Trump’s anti-establishment campaign ever since he took office. It’s hard to do so because the film’s Trump ‘referencing’ never penetrates its surface. Votes in the Rust Belt swung the 2016 election but Simon Fellows, working from a screenplay by Brendan Higgins, doesn’t create a sense of politically resentful local culture. A mental speciality of Steel Country‘s autistic protagonist is reciting the names of American presidents and vice-presidents from Washington-Adams onwards; his own name is Donald yet he’s portrayed throughout as a victim. Donny (Andrew Scott) works as a ‘sanitation truck driver’ (a binman in British parlance). The emphasis on his personal idiosyncrasies muffles any suggestion that he might have had a better blue-collar job in a pre-globalised economy.
Some of the people Donny Devlin comes up against are nasty but it’s too easy to use the malignancy of Trump to substantiate the ‘darkness’ of this film – just as it’s too easy to imply that Donny’s autism is integral to the story. The developmental disorder gives the remarkably talented Andrew Scott opportunities to work up tics and mannerisms and fly off the handle occasionally (though the melancholy that Scott expresses comes through more strongly than any of these). But when Donny becomes obsessed with, and starts his own investigation into, the death of a local child, hardly any attempt is made to connect his condition and his detective work. (In the Scandi-noir TV series The Bridge, by contrast, the linking of the autistic heroine’s psychology and sleuthing helps suppress scepticism that she could have got a job in the Malmö CID in the first place.) Donny proceeds, rather, on the basis of vague intuitions and clunky helpful clues – as when his work colleague Dana (Bronagh Waugh), who turns out to carry a torch for Donny, tells him her mother remembers that local paediatrician Dr Joel Pomorowski (Andrew Masset), a regular visitor to the home of the dead boy, was once accused of molesting young patients. This makes a change from child abuse by the parish priest though you might have thought Pomorowski’s murky past would be, rather than a shock revelation, common knowledge in a backwater.
Donny’s predictable journey towards taking-the-law-into-his-own-hands and carrying out a revenge killing involves a good deal of horrific violence. In the final shot, as he surrenders to the town sheriff (Michael Rose) who’s had it in for him from an early stage, Donny raises his arms into a quasi-crucifixion position. Steel Country is that bad. The cast also includes Sandra Ellis Lafferty as the ailing mother with whom Donny still lives and Christa Beth Campbell as Wendy, the now-teenage child he fathered. As Wendy’s mother, Denise Gough mostly overacts though her last scene, in which she’s quieter, hints at what Gough’s capable of.
25 June 2018
[1] Edinburgh International Film Festival
