Shane Meadows (2006)

A really exciting piece of filmmaking.  The action takes place in the North Midlands in 1983.  Shaun is an only and lonely child, whose father was a soldier killed in the previous year’s Falklands War.    In the course of the summer holidays, he becomes part of a group of skinheads, led by the essentially benign Woody.  Shortly after Shaun has joined the group – which includes girlfriends and an Asian boy – Woody’s old friend Combo is released from prison and the dynamic of the group changes irreparably.   With Woody in charge, the skinheads seem unified by a style of dress and a shared boredom; the advent of Combo moves the group sharply in the direction of racist violence and National Front politics.  The film’s last half hour is gripping but eventually unsatisfying.  Combo is a compelling description of a psychotic but this frightening man gets to dominate proceedings in a way that threatens to eclipse interest in the other characters.  The ending – with its implication that this has been a formative experience for Shaun from which he will now make a clean break and move on – is too conventional.  It takes This is England into summer-I-grew-to-be-a-man territory which belies the powerful mixture of feelings that propels Sean into the group in the first place – and then causes his divided loyalties between Woody and Combo.  But there are great things in this film.   The transfer of leadership from Woody to Combo illustrates in dramatic terms the blurred line between skinheads as a group defined largely by sartorial and musical tastes and a tribe that’s politically motivated.  And the whole picture is imbued with the confusion between these two things, with an awareness that the very high youth unemployment and rising youth crime rates of the early 1980s combined to threaten to erase distinctions between the pernicious and the more positive aspects of the skinhead cult.

Shane Meadows’s direction is intelligently restrained.  He lets you read the themes but doesn’t tell you how to read them.  For example, he leaves us uncertain about how exactly Combo was sent to prison and what effect it’s had on him.  There’s an indication, not dwelt upon, that Combo went to jail through taking the rap for Woody.  Combo’s political orientation might have been hardened by prison but of course it’s not suggested that it caused his psychosis.  Even if Combo’s individuality muffles the political themes of the material in the later stages, the fact that Meadows (who also wrote the screenplay) isn’t too explicit about the forces that have shaped his extreme personality makes This is England thematically more complex and richer.  The physical assortment of kids in the group (very thoughtfully cast) succeeds in undermining the received wisdom that the skinhead look is inevitably de-individualising.  Your uncertainty as to who is school age and who is older strongly evokes a time notorious for the fact that leaving school was, for many, merely a step from one kind of being at a loose end to another.  Meadows keeps taking a scene which looks predictable in an unexpected direction.  Woody’s girlfriend Lol and another girl in the group give Shaun his skinhead haircut;  Shaun’s mother Cynth is angry and storms into the café where the group hang out;  not only do they listen to her apprehensively and politely but, after saying her piece, she thanks them for taking Shaun into their company and giving him something to do – something which evidently doesn’t seriously worry her.  Combo waits for Lol as she’s on her way to work (the fact that she’s employed is striking in itself) and persuades her to sit in his car because he wants to talk to her.  You dread what’s going to happen to her;  you’re both relieved and startled when Lol remains self-possessed and it’s Combo who is emotionally defeated.  At the same time, the scene makes his potential for violence, because you realise how messed up he is, all the more alarming.   And Meadows uses the skinhead wardrobe wittily in a surprising, really funny scene when Shaun’s mother takes him to buy a pair of shoes and he is bolshily determined that they’re going to be Dr Martens.

The excellent cast is led by Thomas Turgoose, an outstanding find.  He manages to suggest both a child and a little old man (and the isolation of both) – and the strength of the conflict between Shaun’s single-mindedness and his wanting to belong.   His laughter and his unhappiness both seem stingingly natural.  In spite of my doubts about Combo’s weight in the overall scheme of the film, Stephen Graham creates a fully developed and impressive portrait.  There are good performances too from Jo Hartley (Cynth), Vicky McClure (Lol), Andrew Shim (Milky, the Asian member of the group) and, especially, the genuinely and memorably eccentric Joe Gilgun as Woody.

2 June 2008