Shane Meadows (1999)

In Shane Meadows’ films, nobody is negligible.   Ken Loach and Mike Leigh are commonly cited as major influences on Meadows:  that may be true stylistically but what could be called his democratic humanism is more reminiscent of Jonathan Demme.   In A Room for Romeo Brass (Meadows’ third feature), the eponymous Romeo’s father Joe – estranged from his wife Carol – seems a vicious nonentity, until we see what he means to his daughter Ladine, how her feelings make Joe ashamed of himself and, especially, when he surprises us by saving the day for pretty well all concerned.   Morell, the twenty-five year old philosopher-misfit who makes friends with the adolescents Romeo and his pal Gavin, is weirdly charming.  He turns out to be something ‘dark’ (to – nearly – use his own word) and hurtful yet this somehow doesn’t diminish him as a person, let alone as a dramatic and comic character.  This description of the splendeurs et misères of life on a working-class housing estate in the East Midlands is sometimes upsetting and occasionally frightening but more often funny and always beautifully, easily observed.   Meadows co-wrote the screenplay with his friend Paul Fraser (who also wrote Twenty Four Seven and Somers Town and provided additional material for Dead Man’s Shoes).  The comedy in A Room for Romeo Brass is very naturally eccentric.   It hardly ever feels forced.

In his feature film debut, Paddy Considine is spectacularly brilliant and inventive as Morell:  he makes the source of this disturbed young man’s socially clueless charisma as hard to pin down as it’s impossible to deny – the charisma is an extension as well as a concealment of Morell’s unhappiness.  As Romeo, Andrew Shim (who went on to play Milky in This is England) is wonderfully acerbic and vulnerable, and Ben Marshall, as the invalid Gavin, is a great laugher.  (You really miss that laughter when Gavin is confined to bed after an operation on his back – this illness is based on something in Paul Fraser’s own childhood.)  What’s remarkable about Meadows’ direction of actors here is how unified he manages to make a cast that was so disparate in terms of background and celebrity at the time the picture was made.  It’s greatly to the credit of Bob Hoskins – in the small role of one of Gavin’s teachers – that he blends in so easily with relative unknowns (but, then, Hoskins had starred in Meadows’ previous feature Twenty Four Seven).  In 1999, Julia Ford, one of the most underrated British screen actresses of her generation, was perhaps the next most established name after Hoskins.   She gives a typically nuanced performance as Gavin’s mother.   James Higgins, as her husband Bill, is more superficial and broadly comic, although he’s affecting in the sequence when Morell is threatening Bill.   As Ladine, Vicky McClure is especially good in responding to Morell’s desperate courtship of her.  Romeo’s parents Joe and Carol are well played by Frank Harper and Ladene Hall.   There’s an exciting, eclectic soundtrack of songs by, among others, Hank Williams, Fairport Convention, Donovan, Stone Roses and Billy Bragg.

14 June 2010