Rufus Norris (2012)

An hour or so into Broken, Rufus Norris’s first feature, the young teenage heroine cries:  ‘It’ll go wrong … everything always go wrong … why do all the bad things happen – never anything good?’ (Or words to that effect.)  These are good questions to ask of the film, adapted by Mark O’Rowe from a novel by Daniel Clay.   Like Paddy Considine’s Tyrannosaur, Broken won the BIFA for best film; like Tyrannosaur, its bleakness may disarm criticism in some quarters.  If you say the bleakness is excessive you can stand accused of being unable to take the truth.  Tyrannosaur and Broken aren’t exactly kindred spirits, though. The power of Considine’s film derives from the possibility that things could be other than grim, and the performances by Peter Mullan and, especially, Olivia Colman, which embrace that possibility.  And though their characters’ fate is predetermined, some of the dialogue that Considine wrote for his fine actors is humorous and textured.  What the two films do have in common is an appetite for showing how violently unhappy lives in England today can be.  The world they present is wholly dystopian – there’s not a sense that anyone on the margins of the story might be enjoying themselves a bit.  The Wikipedia plot synopsis for Broken describes the protagonist Skunk, her elder brother Jed and their solicitor father Archie as living ‘in a typical British suburb’.  (The household also includes an au pair, which naturally raises the question of quite how typical it is.)  Their neighbours on one side are Mr and Mrs Buckley, whose twentysomething son Rick has learning difficulties.  On the other, there’s the widowed Bob Oswald:  he has anger management problems and feral teenage daughters.  The exterior of these houses may be typical; it’s incredible that the mayhem going on inside them is too.  Jimmy McGovern’s BBC drama The Street was pushing it in this respect but the concentration of trauma in Broken is on a different level: there seem to be only three houses on the street and each one is an epicentre of agony.

The plot, not worth going into, is engineered for maximum gruelling (and garish) effect.  Some of the questions that occurred to me during the ninety minutes give a flavour of the story.   When Bob Oswald beats up, first, Rick Buckley and, second, a teacher at Skunk’s school (and the au pair’s ex-boyfriend), why do the police start by arresting the person who’s been attacked, without bothering to find out Oswald’s reasons for carrying out the assault?   How is it that the pathologically overprotective Oswald allows a drugs party to take place in his house – the threshold of which, until this point in the story, no non-family member has crossed?   After Rick fatally stabs his mother and wounds his father one evening (before taking his own life), what does Mr Buckley do throughout the night – so that he doesn’t know that the diabetic Skunk, who’s also in the house, has been having a hyperglycaemic attack for many hours in the same room where Rick’s corpse is lying – and it’s left for Bob Oswald, whose own daughter has had a fatal miscarriage the previous evening (she was made pregnant by Jed) to rescue her?   (I’m not making this up.)

There never seems to be enough light in the images, as if Rufus Norris had asked his DoP Rob Hardy to keep reminding the viewer what dark matter the film is composed of – as if daylight would detract from an uncompromising approach.  On the plus side, the music by Electric Wave Bureau, aka Damon Albarn (who collaborated with Rufus Norris on the 2011 stage work Doctor Dee), is lively, and its moods various – very refreshing in this context.  And some of the performances make what’s happening on screen, as well as on the soundtrack, worthwhile too.  Larry Lamb’s thirteen-year-old daughter Eloise Laurence has wit as well as truthfulness as Skunk.  Rory Kinnear plays Bob Oswald with skilful empathy – he makes you (nearly) believe in what impels Oswald’s behaviour so that the man’s my-girls-can-do-no-wrong mindset is genuinely alarming.  Robert Emms gives the troubled Rick a touching self-awareness – particularly in his reluctance to return home from the mental hospital he’s been in.   There’s nothing that Denis Lawson and Clare Burt (Eloise Laurence’s mother) can do, though, with the clichéd roles of Rick’s anxious, infantilising parents.  The cast also includes Tim Roth (as Archie), Cillian Murphy (the teacher), and Zana Marjanovic (the au pair).

Broken is a reminder that a film straining to paint things black is – because of the straining – almost always more lowering than an organic dramatisation of unhappy lives.  Perhaps the very worst thing in the movie is the no less contrived hopeful ending.   It’s Bob Oswald, who seemed beyond redemption, who is Skunk’s eventual saviour.  After he’s found her unconscious, she hovers in hospital on the verge of death; indeed, she has a dream in which her family and neighbours – a fair number of whom have by now lost their lives – are gathered together in a church and appear to be inviting her to stay with them.   Skunk, however, follows the receding figure of her father back to the land of the living:  she wakes from her coma to appreciate him as never before.  I saw this film at the end of the week in which the case of Nicola Edgington had been in the news.  The schizophrenic Edgington made repeated 999 calls, insisting that she needed medical help, shortly before murdering another woman.  It’s difficult – crude and lurid as the Rick Buckley strand of the story in Broken is – to ignore the resonance with the Edgington controversy.  It’s nowhere near enough, however, to make the film ‘true’.

The other odd but superficial resonance is with To Kill a Mockingbird:  there’s the vaguely tomboyish girl protagonist (Skunk/Scout), who has an older brother (Jed/Jem) and a wifeless father whose business is the law;   the characters of Bob Oswald and Rick Buckley seem almost a conflation of qualities in Harper Lee’s Boo Radley, who turns out to be more than a figure of fun and/or fear.  I can’t say if Mike O’Rowe’s screenplay is a faithful adaptation of Broken and I don’t know if Daniel Clay has already written other novels.  But if it is, and if he hasn’t, I hope, with no disrespect to Harper Lee, that Clay follows suit and never publishes another.

10 March 2013