Sam Taylor-Wood (2009)

The conceptual artist Sam Taylor-Wood’s first cinema feature is a curiously uninteresting film about the adolescence (and, in a few flashbacks, the childhood) of John Lennon.  The story spans around five years (1955-60), taking in the last part of Lennon’s schooldays, at Quarry Bank High School, and his setting up of the Quarrymen, and ending on the eve of The Beatles’ first trip to Hamburg.   We see Lennon’s first meeting with Paul McCartney in July 1957, when the Quarrymen played at a church fete, and something of their early relationship as musicians – a relationship based more on mutual respect than on personal liking for one another.  But Nowhere Boy is principally about Lennon’s relationship with his mother, Julia, and her elder sister, John’s Aunt Mimi, with whom he grew up (and to whom he stayed close throughout his life).  The tensions between Lennon and the two women are always palpable (not to say obvious) but Taylor-Wood delays the explanation of how he came to live with Mimi rather than Julia until late in the film.  The director’s refusal to go much below the surface of the story is rather tantalising in the early stages – at least in the moments when Anne-Marie Duff’s brittle Julia comes across like her son’s first groupie.  But the concentration on externals has become frustrating and a bit tedious by the time the key revelations eventually arrive.  At this point, Matt Greenhalgh’s script (based on a memoir by Lennon’s half-sister, Julia Baird) turns into a far from unique family melodrama.  Just at the moment when the two sisters make peace, Julia is killed in a road accident (in July 1958, by which time Lennon was a student at Liverpool College of Art).

In virtually the last scene of the film, John tells Mimi about Hamburg and asks her to sign a form ‘where it says parent or guardian’.  When she asks, ‘Which am I?’ he says, ‘Both’ and Mimi wells up behind her determinedly unyielding front.  This exchange is bungled.  Taylor-Wood has Kristin Scott-Thomas as Mimi ask the question in a tone that indicates she needs to know the answer in order to sign the form – which makes no sense, when she hasn’t even looked at it – then react as if she had been asking what she really meant to her nephew.  It would be much stronger if she looked at the form, asked the question in a simply practical way, and was then emotionally floored by his answer.  Otherwise, Scott-Thomas does well in a part for which she’s too sophisticatedly glamorous.  She’s by far the biggest name in the cast but she doesn’t stick out in the way I feared she might:  you can tell that she’s got a good understanding of how to play the role – you can hear it – even if she always seems at a slight remove from it.  Scott-Thomas and Duff work surprisingly well as sisters.   Aaron Johnson is convincingly bolshy but vulnerable as Lennon; he has some presence although it’s not an exciting presence.  Thomas Sangster’s McCartney has a precocious shrewdness.   There’s good work in small roles from David Morrissey (Julia’s latest husband), David Threlfall (Mimi’s husband, who dies very early on in the film) and Andrew Buchan (as Michael Fishwick, the Liverpool University student who becomes Mimi’s lodger and, we assume, her lover).    The cinematography is by Seamus McGarvey.

27 December 2009