Ben Wheatley (2013)

On the first Friday of July 2013, A Field in England opened in cinemas, became immediately available on DVD and video on demand, and was screened on Film 4.  This kind of simultaneous release was unprecedented (in this country anyway); it meant that Ben Wheatley’s latest film received much more media attention than it would have done if shown in cinemas only.  Unlike Wheatley’s two previous movies (dislikeable and limited as Kill List and Sightseers are in many ways), A Field in England is really boring – the prospect of an interview with the director immediately after the Film 4 showing was the only incentive to see the film out.  But as soon as Wheatley explained that he’d wanted to take the audience into an historical past without giving us our bearings, I realised I hadn’t got the picture wrong.  Wheatley contrasted his approach with that of makers of films set in a bygone era in which a pivotal character acts as the audience’s orienting proxy; he implied that a man called Whitehead, played by Reece Shearsmith, plunged the viewer of A Field in England straight into its English Civil War setting.  But Shearsmith doesn’t in the least suggest a real seventeenth century character:  his caricature of a bookish astrologer cum aspiring lacemaker, among the clods and/or brutes who make up the other dramatis personae, hasn’t anything like the depth or truthfulness of his best work in The League of Gentlemen – although of course it continues in this feature way beyond the sketch length it seems scaled for.  As long as Wheatley and the screenwriter Amy Jump give Whitehead plenty to say, the film is tedious; Reece Shearsmith improves when he can do more physical characterisation – when the timorous Whitehead turns into a killer-survivor, wears a hat that brings to mind Clint Eastwood in the Sergio Leone trilogy and eventually walks into the sunset.

The other men in the field – they include a couple of Civil War deserters and an Irishman called O’Neill whom Whitehead is (I think) intending to bring to justice for stealing alchemical secrets from his ex-master – don’t stand out in the way that Whitehead does.   Wheatley has cast some talented people here – notably Richard Glover (who was also good in Sightseers) and Ryan Pope – but A Field in England is distinctive not for the human beings in the story but for the black and white visual scheme that contains them.   The squalid physical realism is familiar from earlier Wheatley films but the look of this one is more varied than that of Kill List or (at least until its later stages) Sightseers.  The largeness of the field, where all the action takes place, gives it a metaphorical dimension and there are striking effects:  the play of sunlight; Whitehead stuffing (magic) mushrooms into his mouth; the psychedelic effects of the mushrooms (which, because of their strobic intensity, I had to look away from).  In his Film 4 interview Wheatley stressed how much he’d read up on seventeenth century religion, magic and science in preparing for A Field in England – as if merely referring to these in the finished film was enough, and proof of his penetrating research.   He still comes into his own most fully with the graphically violent flourishes – a face blown off by gunshot, an ankle blasted from the foot below it.

13 July 2013