Brian Welsh (2010)

According to his IMDB profile, this is the second dramatic feature written and directed by Brian Welsh (following last year’s Kin).  He has a serious subject:  a legend on screen at the end of the picture dedicates it to the ex-servicemen and ex-servicewomen who struggle to readapt to life away from the front line and end up in jail for offences committed as civilians.  This is what happens – or, as the story concludes, is about to happen – to Suzy (Joanne Froggatt), recently returned from a tour of duty in Iraq.  She’s from an army family; her husband Mark (Mel Raido) is a soldier too and has also been in Iraq recently (I wasn’t clear exactly when, in relation to Suzy).  The early sequences of In Our Name, describing the social culture and environment of Suzy’s life outside the army and her professional ambitions, are promising.  But, once the traumatic memories of her recent tour of duty start flashing into Suzy’s mind and Mark’s loco side comes to the fore, the film degenerates, increasingly rapidly, into forced melodrama.  You lose patience and, eventually, interest.

In a prologue we see Suzy on military training with the North East Gunners, then on a train with other soldiers returning, after her time in Iraq, to her home in Middlesbrough.  The film’s closing dedication belies Brian Welsh’s sharp-eyed awareness of the blurred line between becoming one of the country’s ‘heroes’ and living on the margins of delinquency, which is adumbrated in the behaviour of the squaddies on the train.  If you didn’t know they were soldiers, you’d take them – with two exceptions – for mildly intimidating yobs, making a noise and a pissed-up nuisance of themselves in the way they treat the girl who’s running the drinks and snacks trolley service.  The exceptions are Suzy herself, sensitively mediating between her male companions and the trolley attendant, and a quiet guy called Paul (Andrew Knott) who, it soon becomes clear, is a particular friend.   Welsh is onto something important in suggesting that the returning, culturally impoverished soldiers are doubly at a loss what to do on civvy street.   From the start, Suzy is overly alert to the low-grade lawlessness and vaguely threatening behaviour of youngsters hanging around the council estate where she, Mark and their young daughter Cass (Chloe Jayne Wilkinson) live.   It’s as if Suzy is both primed, from her army experience, to spot danger round any corner and suspicious of people who are, in both senses, close to home.

The relationships within the family are initially absorbing too.  There’s a welcome home party for Suzy:  her father Frank (John Henshaw) makes a speech, during which he ticks off Mark for a coarse interruption and we register the tension and Mark’s embarrassment.  Cass won’t speak to Suzy when she first comes back:  is it resentment of her absence or of the fact that her mother’s return compromises the close, affectionate relationship Cass seems to have developed with her father in recent months?   This element has a particular edge when Cass says she can’t sleep and wants to be in her parents’ bed – although it’s Mark, already frustrated that Suzy has come back unready to have sex with him, who doesn’t want the child in the bed between them.  It’s a pity that this ambiguity goes the same way as Welsh’s implication that the armed forces are an attractive occupation for people without much else in the way of stimulating career prospects.   Both get submerged in crude attempts to dramatise the traumatic legacy of warfare.

Suzy can’t get out of her head the death of an Iraqi girl that she witnessed or stop connecting this dead child with her own daughter.  At first we get this in flashback splinters.  Then Suzy’s sister Marie, a primary school teacher (well played by Janine Leigh), persuades Suzy to come, with Paul, to talk to her class about their experiences in Iraq.  In a badly staged classroom sequence, Suzy veers from asking, in a bleak, hollow tone, ‘What do you want us to talk about?’ to answering a question from one of the kids (‘What was the worst thing you saw?’) as if she were on a psychiatrist’s couch rather than with a group of nine or ten year olds.   It’s here that we get the full details of the Iraqi girl’s death – a punishment, it seems, for accepting sweets from Suzy when she and Paul were engaged in hearts and minds work with the locals.   These revelations emerge excruciatingly slowly:  Brian Welsh is spellbound by Joanne Froggatt to an extent that falsifies the scene.  He largely ignores the faces of the children, who must be puzzled and scared by Suzy’s halting delivery and evident distress.  It’s incredible that neither Marie nor Paul intervenes but Welsh doesn’t want to get in the way of his lead actress’s big monologue.

From this point on, nearly everything is badly overdone.  Suzy and Mark come home from a night at the pub in a minicab.  There’s Asian music on the car radio and Mark starts needling the British Asian driver.  If you expected a Muslim cabbie to try to stay discreet under provocation, you’d be wrong in this case.  The driver doesn’t just rise to the bait:  he talks in journalese about ‘innocent civilians in war-torn countries’.  It’s conceivable that Brian Welsh is subverting, in an ethnically striking way, the cliché of the right-wing white cabbie who likes to spout politics – but it’s doubtful too.   This conversation has to happen for no better reason than that it’s needed to trigger what happens next.  Mark tells the driver that he’s a British soldier; the driver and his pals reciprocate by daubing graffiti on the walls of the family home and putting excrement through the letter box; Suzy and Mark and a couple of his mates then go and beat the Muslim driver nearly to death.   Suzy leaves Mark, taking Cass and a gun from the local army barracks with her.  A shot from the weapon, fired by the child, eventually brings Suzy to her senses (simple as that) but too late.

Joanne Froggatt’s face has a mixture of frailty and stubbornness that seems very right  and she’s lovely in the homecoming scene at the start, when Suzy, in response to Frank’s praising speech, says a few nervy, giggling words off the cuff to the gathering of family and friends (most of whom are conspicuous by their absence when things get unhappy).   Froggatt plays Suzy with such ferocious commitment, however, that it’s too much.  She locks herself into the role so tightly – she so evidently sees it as a serious enterprise – that the performance becomes military in the wrong way:  the actress looks to be on a mission.  When she lets go and lets us look into the character instead of projecting it, she’s affectingly expressive (particularly in a sequence when Mark is penetrating Suzy anally) but these occasions get to be rare.  Suzy is too obviously going through hell:  Joanne Froggatt isn’t able to interiorise her anguish in a way that allows us not only to perceive it but also to see how others might not spot it so easily.  You can accept that Suzy was attracted to Mark in the first place but it’s hard to believe from Mel Raido’s forceful but, again, too narrowly focused characterisation that this handsome psycho was ever able to conceal his maladjustment and pathological jealousy.  Andrew Knott as Paul comes as a relief in that he has stayed sane after his tour of duty.  Knott’s acting is well judged:  it’s a pity the same can’t be said for the director in choosing the moment when Paul can no longer keep the lid on his fears for Suzy’s safety if she stays with Mark.  Chloe Jayne Wilkinson has a haunting, watchful suspiciousness as Cass:  there are strong moments when you catch the child looking at a mother who’s become a stranger in more ways than one.

14 December 2010