Julian Jarrold, James Marsh, Anand Tucker (2009)

The Damned United arrived in cinemas just a few weeks after Channel 4’s adaptation of David Peace’s ‘Red Riding’ books – done in three instalments although Peace’s novels are a quartet.   I was intrigued by the first of these films.  I liked the way in which the young crime reporter was presented as both cockily ambitious and masochistically determined (Andrew Garfield made this journey from self-congratulation to martyrdom very persuasively) – and how the story, which began as an apparently conventional narrative about investigative journalism, began to spin out of control into something on (or over) the edge of paranoid fantasy – constantly disorienting because the director Julian Jarrold kept the grimly naturalistic and pulp fiction elements of the material in tense, precarious balance.  But seeing the other two films – all written by Tony Grisoni but each with a different director (James Marsh did the second and Anand Tucker the third) – left me thinking I’d more or less misunderstood the Jarrold film.

The second piece, about the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper, contained a mixture of elements that were discomfiting in the wrong way.  Peace retains Peter Sutcliffe’s name (and some of the details of the original killings) but changes the names of the women he murdered – and even his wife’s forename – out of respect for the victims’ families, according to an interview in Radio Times.  For anyone who knows or remembers much of the crimes – there must be quite a few of us – this seems a gesture of such shallow formality that its effect is more offensive than retaining the original names.   (The effect was compounded in the film by a display of mug shots of the Ripper’s victims in the police investigation room; these weren’t the actual women but corresponded to them closely enough to allow you to pair up the photographs with their real life counterparts.)   Joseph Mawle’s eerie, disconnected calm made his brief appearance as Sutcliffe impressive – but the film reduced his serial killings to secondary crimes against humanity:  the West Yorkshire police’s corruption and violence emphatically and gruesomely retained top billing.  References to the spectacular, Taxi Driver-ish shoot-up that ended the previous episode seemed to mean that it had happened in reality (as distinct from in the mind of the Garfield character) but that fortress Leeds had somehow managed to keep the event quiet – as if the West Riding of Yorkshire was so primevally impenetrable that the Yorkshire Post, presented in the first film as hand in glove with the police, was the region’s sole means of communication with the world outside the region.

There was plenty of good acting throughout these films – from, as well as Garfield and Mawle, Anthony Flanagan, Rebecca Hall, Peter Mullan, Sean Bean, David Morrissey, Mark Addy and (unusually) Lesley Sharp – but, by the time I watched the last part of the trilogy, I’d lost faith and, to a large extent, interest in the material.  The blending of naturalism and fantasy had come to seem merely stylistic.  As such – and given the subject matter – I thought it really was morally objectionable, even though I’d been completely on the side of Red Riding when it started, predisposed in favour of something that would rile those sensitive television viewers who just-can’t-bear-violence.

5, 12 and 19 March 2009