Ben Wheatley (2015)

‘Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.’

This is the famous first line of J G Ballard’s dystopian novel High-Rise, which describes the breakdown of mod cons and the moral order in a newly-built high-rise block in London in the mid-1970s.  (The novel was published in 1975.)  Within a paragraph, Ballard has begun to relate these ‘unusual events’.  The prologue to Ben Wheatley’s film lasts only a few minutes but is significantly different.  The opening shots of the interior of the building suggest the aftermath of cataclysm; the canine limbs roasting on a spit are, rather than a bewildering starting point, the climax to the prologue and of a piece with the images that have preceded them.  High-Rise is Wheatley’s fifth feature.  I’ve not seen his first, Down Terrace; of the next three, Sightseers has the best script (it’s the only Wheatley film to date for which someone other than he or Amy Jump had the main writing credit).  Sightseers wasn’t as effective as it should have been, though, thanks to the director’s impatience to indulge his appetite for mayhem – a predilection that trumps storytelling:  it comes as no surprise that he plays more of his hand than J G Ballard does at the very start of High-Rise.  It’s no surprise either, therefore, that Wheatley and Amy Jump (who has the sole screenplay credit this time) prove to be less interested in the process of disintegration than in putting on a gruesomely spectacular show – a more expensively gruesome spectacular show than the budgets for Wheatley’s previous films allowed.  (None of them cost a seven-figure sum.  IMDB and Wikipedia don’t currently give the production costs of High-Rise but Nick Roddick’s interview with Wheatley in the Standard last September mentions ‘a budget north of $5m’.)

The inhabitants of the high-rise reflect a British social hierarchy, though only part of the real thing.  The tower block’s architect, Anthony Royal (Jeremy Irons), lives at the very top with his wife Ann (Keeley Hawes).  The roof of the building features a formal garden and a Marie Antoinette folly.  This was designed by Royal for his wife but she remains unsmiling – and indolent, except for hosting parties for the upper-class residents who live on the upper levels.  Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston), a medical academic, moves into an apartment on the twenty-fifth of forty floors.  (Ballard probably meant his protagonist’s name to evoke the psychiatrist R D Laing – just as the architect’s surname is right for the man at the top – but there doesn’t seem to be a deeper connection.)  Lower down the building are families – one of them including a documentary film-maker called Richard Wilder (Luke Evans), his pregnant wife Helen (Elisabeth Moss) and their young children.  The dwellers in the lower depths are the first to suffer from the power failures and other technical breakdowns; much of the violence becomes tribal; but nearly everyone in the building seems to be middle-class or upwards.  Among the few exceptions are the surly, antagonistic Nathan Steele (Reece Shearsmith) and the caretaker (Robert Way):  their underclass status is established mainly by their relatively unprepossessing looks.

The voice of Margaret Thatcher, extolling laissez-faire capitalism, supplies a brief postscript to the film.  It’s hard to fathom why Wheatley decided to introduce this jarring, incongruous note of Political Irony – unless as intended compensation for neglecting the social structure details of the story during the preceding two hours.  He’s indifferent to detailing the class distinctions of the place other than by obvious visual means – nor does he dramatise the gradual but inexorable breakdown of life in the building.  Wheatley prefers to keep upping the lethal ante and the result is a film chock-full of super-gross images, which plenty of people will enjoy and plenty more will be nervous about not enjoying.  The latter can find relief in the occasional campy touches.  Edgy laughter in the Curzon at Wimbledon settled into easier titters when a costume party at the top of the building was scored to an arrangement of Abba’s ‘SOS’.  The number is reprised at greater length in a later sequence that’s closer to the plangent tone of the Abba original – but ‘SOS’ got a laugh here too.  (I felt grateful that this is an impregnably good pop song.)  In the foyer afterwards, a youngish woman was telling her companion that this ‘must be one of the best uses ever made of an Abba song’ in a film.  You could hear from her awkward, eager voice she thought this was the right thing to say.  The ominous original music for the film, by Clint Mansell, is mostly superfluous to the more-than-self-sufficient sights on the screen, photographed by Laurie Rose.

For Wheatley’s purposes, Tom Hiddleston may be the ideal Laing.  I first saw Hiddleston on screen in Midnight in Paris, in a cameo as F Scott Fitzgerald, and The Deep Blue Sea, as Freddie Page.  With prior expectations of how those roles might be played, I found Hiddleston feeble in both (more damagingly so, of course, in the larger part) but he’s now a big name:  High-Rise was released in cinemas midway through the six-week run of the BBC dramatisation of John le Carré’s The Night Manager, in which Hiddleston played Jonathan Pine, the title role.  It’s not difficult to see why he’s getting these high-profile jobs.  He holds the camera:  he’s very good-looking and able to suggest in his face a sharp mind at work behind it.  But he shows you that his character’s thinking rather than what he’s thinking.  Both in The Night Manager (which I saw on and off) and in High-Rise, Hiddleston seems like an intelligent person who’s watched screen acting and decided to give it a try.  He does an able impression of an actor acting, except that there’s no characterisation.

Shortly after Laing moves in, he goes to a drinks party and finds himself stuck with Nathan Steele.   According to Steele, Laing, inexperienced in the ways of the building, is responsible for blocking up the rubbish chute.  In response, Laing affably reassures him:  ‘I’m a quick learner’.  As he says this, Hiddleston rocks forward on his toes, looming towards Reece Shearsmith, then rocks back again.  This socially exuberant movement doesn’t connect with anything we’ve so far seen of Laing nor with anything we see subsequently – it’s rather what an actor does, so that you notice him.  Hiddleston’s meaningless charisma may not matter for as long as he’s playing a ‘chameleon’ (I gather this is what Jonathan Pine is meant to be) or animating a character as thinly-written as Laing is (at least in the Wheatley-Jump version of the story).  His approach works fine in High-Rise but when Laing has relatively little screen time, during part of the second half, you don’t miss him.  There’s no one to miss – only a series of sleek effects.   I’m looking forward to seeing Tom Hiddleston in I Saw the Light, the forthcoming Hank Williams biopic, in which he’ll need to add up to a personality. 

Hiddleston is surrounded by a mixed bag of supporting turns that range from the creditable-all-things-considered (Sienna Miller) to the even-worse-than-it-was-bound-to-be (James Purefoy).   Miller plays Charlotte, who is some kind of assistant to Royal – who also fathered her son, Toby (Louis Suc) – and has a relationship with Laing.  Purefoy’s cartoon of one of the high-ups is quite remarkably clumsy.   As Richard Wilder, Luke Evans is a mixed bag all on his own but he gives the film’s most taking performance.   As usual, Evans’s speaking voice lacks colour but his shouting voice is a lot better, and he has plenty of opportunity to use it – as Wilder, relegated to one of the bottom floors, leads a rebellion against the status quo and tries to make a film documenting what’s going on in the high-rise.   Evans is amusingly vigorous leading a march into the building’s swimming pool, to evict a private function and allow the residents’ kids to use the facility.  He’s a cross between a big kid himself and a much duller version of McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (this isn’t only because the top-floor residents discuss lobotomising Wilder).   Later on, though, Evans is surprisingly witty – as he purposefully eats a tin of dog food (food for dogs rather than dogs for food) and especially when, at the height of the mayhem, Wilder is asked how things are going and replies, ‘Comme ci, comme ça’.  I think I also warmed to Evans because Wilder’s angry, thwarted fight chimed with my feelings of powerlessness against the onslaught of Ben Wheatley’s hideous film-making.

Roz Dineen in the TLS is right enough when she describes the exterior of the high-rise as ‘stunningly rendered, back-lit by a flare-casting sunshine, surrounded by cars from the 1970s’.   Wheatley – with the help of his production designer Mark Tildesley and costume designer Odile Dicks-Mireaux – strikes a clever balance between a period setting (many cigarettes are smoked) and stretching this so as to imply an enduring relevance to the themes of Ballard’s story.   The building is such a dominant image that you’d be prepared to accept its residents and facilities, which include a large supermarket, as a detached, microcosmic world.  Ben Wheatley, however, isn’t sufficiently disciplined to push for this kind of suspension of disbelief.  If he were, he surely wouldn’t have opened things out to include sequences at Laing’s work place.  The most striking of these involves Laing’s demonstration to a group of student doctors of the functioning of the human skull and brain.  This scene shows the physiologist Laing to be just as much a head doctor as his real-life namesake – but only in order for Wheatley to show a man’s head being stripped of flesh and bloodily deconstructed with a saw.  The setting of High-Rise is de luxe brutalist.  The film luxuriates in brutality.

24 March 2016