Mark Gill (2017)

England Is Mine ends with Steven Morrissey outside the front door of Johnny Marr’s house.  Although Morrissey and Marr are already acquainted, the writer-director Mark Gill seems to intend this last sequence to equate to the first meeting of Lennon and McCartney at the Woolton Parish Church Garden Fete in July 1957.  The moment is momentous.  The doorbell rings; the rest is history.  Provided, of course, you know the history.  Gill’s Morrissey biopic, covering the period from 1976 to 1982 (from its subject’s late teens to his early twenties), depends for texture and resonance on familiarity with the music that Morrissey and The Smiths went on to make.   I don’t have this knowledge:  I can hear Morrissey’s singing voice in my head but not his songs in detail.  I didn’t even recognise the film’s title as a quote from The Smiths’ ‘Still Ill’ (‘England is mine, and it owes me a living’).

I did know something of Morrissey’s reputation as a poetic urban miserablist and controversialist, even before I started reading his 2013 autobiography (entitled Autobiography).  Acutely aware of his public image, Morrissey imposes his flamboyant pessimism on his childhood memories:  the implication that this is what he felt and thought about these early experiences at the time they occurred rings false.  Mark Gill’s approach is different.  England Is Mine gets across Morrissey’s apartness but without the sense of predestination that infuses Autobiography.  This may be more truthful but it makes for a duller film than the book is a read.  The visual and emotional colouring is very different too.  In Autobiography, the schools that Morrissey attended and the neighbourhood he grew up in are hellish – from his point of view, dynamically antagonistic.  Gill uses a recurring image of dark swirling water but this isn’t miasmic and Manchester is otherwise grey.  The confrontation between the hero and his environment is less distinctive and dramatic on screen:  Morrissey’s story is just another attempt by a creative soul to break out of dun-coloured anonymity.  Discovering the New York Dolls in 1973 was an epiphany for Morrissey ‘on a planet that even I had felt certain was as flat-tire [sic][1] as fuck’.    Although the certificate for England Is Mine warns of strong language, the film feels like a case of expletives deleted – the flat tyre without the fuck.

Mark Gill has said in interview that he ‘doesn’t want to upset’ Morrissey and it shows.  England Is Mine is cautious and limited.  Every so often, the picture seems about to catch fire but doesn’t – for example, the morning after Steven’s public debut as a vocalist, when he enters a lift with unusual exuberance.  Of course the lack of follow-through to this chimes with Steven’s back-to-earth experience but that’s not enough to explain the lack of dramatic excitement.  It’s as if Gill and William Thacker, who shares the screenplay credit with him, decided the protagonist was such a towering, multi-faceted figure that the most a film about his life could do was capture just one or two of his many aspects.   As a result, Jack Lowden’s Morrissey comes over as a largely innocuous misfit (at least until his hair is cut shorter in the later stages, which has something of a reverse Samson effect).  Lowden is quietly witty, though, and conveys convincingly his character’s sexually ambiguous nature.  Having seen him as a Spitfire pilot in Dunkirk only ten days previously, I had to be impressed by Lowden’s versatility (and change of appearance).

What draws Steven Morrissey to those rare creatures who become his friends isn’t clear but the young actors playing them, and other characters, do well – Jessica Brown Findlay (as Linder Sterling), Adam Lawrence (Billy Duffy), Jodie Comer (Christine, a fellow pen-pusher at the Inland Revenue), Katherine Pearce (the ill-fated Anji Hardie), Vivienne Bell (Steven’s sister, Jackie), Laurie Kynaston (Johnny Marr).   It’s good that petty authority figures in the story are interpreted with more nuance and sympathy than you might expect – by Graeme Hawley, as the exasperated manager at the tax office, and the uncredited actor who plays a job centre employee struggling unavailingly to conduct an interview with Steven.  This is a positive difference from the autobiography, which features a long succession of viciously inadequate schoolteachers etc:  Morrissey gets his own back on these physical and/or emotional sadists through verbal sadism.

Mark Gill’s low-key narrative is occasionally interrupted by jarring biopic clichés – like the crushing setback Steven suffers when Billy Duffy gets taken up by a London music producer while he is left behind in Manchester.  Or the episode in which, working briefly as a hospital orderly, Steven sees Anji again:  she’s now a terminally ill cancer patient and her death sparks unsurprising existential reflections on the part of the depressed hero.  There’s even a you-can-be-anyone-you-want-to-be pep talk from Steven’s mother (Simone Kirby).   A few days after seeing Prick Up Your Ears again and reading of Alan Bennett’s struggle to dramatise the act of writing, it was a bit astonishing to find Mark Gill, thirty years later, unashamed to include repeated shots of Morrissey labouring at the typewriter.  (The machine, along with the vinyl, supplies a touch of retro charm to proceedings but it hardly reactivates the cliché.)   It’s disappointing not to get more sense from the film of the protagonist’s way with words, other than the letter he writes that gets published in NME.   Mark Gill’s concern not to give offence to Morrissey undersells him and therefore seems unlikely to achieve its aim.  Still, I was one of only two people in the audience for England Is Mine, at HMV Curzon in Wimbledon:  it struck me that might appeal to Morrissey’s voice-in-the-wilderness side.

10 August 2017

[1] The book uses American English spelling.