Sean Durkin (2020)
Sean Durkin’s second cinema film arrives nearly a decade after his first, Martha Marcy May Marlene. In the meantime, he’s racked up several producing credits but only one for directing – the 2013 British television mini-series Southcliffe. That was scripted by Tony Grisoni but, as with his debut feature, Durkin has the sole writing credit on The Nest. The film’s first half is promising, the second increasingly disappointing – and surprising only in its failure to surprise. The main character, Rory O’Hara (Jude Law), is a trader in the financial markets – an Englishman abroad at the start of the story. He works in New York, where he lives with his American wife Allison (Carrie Coon), their pre-adolescent son Ben (Charlie Shotwell) and Sam (Oona Roche), Allison’s older daughter from a previous relationship. Rory suddenly announces to Allison he’s gone as far as he can on Wall Street. It’s the mid-1980s and the deregulation of British financial markets is kicking in. He reckons the other side of the pond is now the place to make a bigger splash. Selfishly ambitious Rory is asking for trouble. He gets his comeuppance ad nauseam.
Durkin sets things up effectively, though. We don’t hear the phone conversation with his former boss in London but we see from Rory’s face that he’s keeping a secret from his family – a secret that his zippy bonhomie easily conceals from them. When he plays soccer with Ben and one of his friends, Rory is a big kid who has to win but the boys enjoy themselves, too. He travels to England ahead of Allison, Sam and Ben, and, proudly excited, welcomes them to the pile in the Surrey countryside that he’s bought as their new home. He informs the children that the flooring dates from the 1700s and, if that’s not enough, that Led Zeppelin once stayed at the mansion. Rory asks the car driver who’s conveyed the rest of the family there to take a photo of them all. The driver obliges before it’s pointed out that Sam isn’t in the group. A second photo, including her, is taken, at Rory’s request. The moment, even so, is a neatly incisive indication of the relative importance to him of his son and his stepdaughter. Soon after, we learn that Sam is attending a state school while Ben has been enrolled in a private one.
Commodity broker Arthur Davis (Michael Culkin) welcomes back Rory with open arms. He and his wife (Annabel Leventon) even host a posh soirée, at which Arthur describes Rory to the gathering as one of the most talented men he’s ever known. In the course of this tribute, Arthur also mentions that Rory asked to rejoin his firm. This is news to Allison, whose husband told her Arthur was begging Rory to come back on board. He’s too drunk on hearing his praises sung to notice that Arthur has revealed his lie to Allison. But this is a turning point in The Nest and hints at what proves to be the fundamental weakness of Durkin’s script. It transpires that Rory’s transatlantic career had ground to a halt; back in London, he’s failing to seal any new deals and, at the same time, ostentatiously living beyond his means. Durkin, in effect, equates the moral bankruptcy of Rory’s ambition with financial bankruptcy. Since plenty of people with similar values did very well out of the Big Bang of 1986, it can’t credibly be suggested that the likes of Rory were doomed to fail. Perhaps Durkin believes deregulation helped sow the seeds of the global financial crisis twenty years later but this isn’t the message he conveys because Rory goes broke immediately – whereas the relatively unassuming Steve (Adeel Akhtar), another of Arthur’s team and Rory’s former friend as well as colleague, goes from strength to strength. The film focuses so much on Rory’s personal defects that he ceases to be a typical financial wheeler-dealer, and The Nest can’t succeed as a critique of brittle capitalism.
By not allowing Rory to be any good at his job, Durkin makes it a puzzle as to why shrewd Arthur lauds his former protégé so extravagantly. He’s also initially receptive to Rory’s proposal that Arthur sell his company to a more powerful American outfit looking for a London base: Arthur agrees to talk to Rory’s contact in Chicago. It’s a few days later, after the latter has been refusing to answer his calls, that Rory discovers Arthur didn’t like the terms offered and broke off discussions. When Rory demands to know why Arthur didn’t tell him, the answer is that it was late on the previous Friday afternoon when Arthur pulled the plug. It makes no sense that Rory, immoderately pleased with his big idea, has let the best part of another working week go by without checking with Arthur how talks are progressing (especially when Rory can’t get to speak to Chicago).
It’s no more clear what Allison sees in her husband or what, apart from good sex and the cup of tea he brings to her bedside each morning, has kept their relationship going even in New York. Allison enjoys her work there as a riding instructor and doesn’t want to uproot the family’s life. She’s seemingly placated when Rory arranges for stables to be built in the vast grounds of their English home – until, that is, the builder’s men down tools because his bills aren’t getting paid. Whereas his antipathy to Rory is unequivocal and limiting, Durkin’s treatment of his female protagonist is vague. Although Carrie Coon’s emotional variety helps convert this to involving ambiguity, it’s ever harder to ignore the suspicion that Allison is difficult to pin down chiefly because her character is underwritten. For example, the controlled feminist indignation she shows at the Davises’ party goes nowhere.
Allison is also on the receiving end of more than her fair share of clumsy plotting. It’s through a phone conversation with the builder that she finds out about the unpaid bills but, when her beloved horse Richmond collapses, she doesn’t think of phoning for a vet. Instead, she fetches up at a local farm to seek help. It’s not as if Allison knows the mansion’s telephone has been disconnected (another unpaid bill): she learns that from Rory when he returns home later, and they have one of several stand-up rows. The farmer, who pronounces Richmond beyond help and shoots him, is introduced also to allow Allison, in order to earn a few quid, to get labouring work with him. She seems to find the work fulfilling but it’s hardly mentioned again – until she tells astounded fellow diners at a swanky London restaurant what her job is. This dinner, with prospective business partners for Steve and Rory, is the first stage of a gruesome night that forms the climax to the story. Allison is there because her husband wants to her to create a decorative good impression but the marital relationship is now in such a parlous state that it’s impossible to believe she’d agree to help him out. She doesn’t appear to accompany Rory with the intention of stymieing him – she speaks her mind only in infuriated reaction to his arrogant bullshit in the restaurant.
In any case, Rory’s more than capable of stymieing himself single-handed: the other men at the dinner decide they want a deal but with the proviso that it involves Steve only. Durkin really won’t give Rory an inch. After learning that the Chicago buyout is off, he decides to visit his mother (Anne Reid) in her London council flat. He’s been estranged from her, and from his brother, for years – supposedly because his father, no longer around, was a violent abuser. The mother knows nothing about Allison or the children, though it seems surprising that ultra-competitive Rory hasn’t wanted to keep boasting to her about how high he’s risen above his humble beginnings. It’s even more surprising that he chooses the occasion of a big knockback at work for a reunion with his mother: he can hardly be looking for sympathy from her and certainly doesn’t get it. Jude Law is engaging at the start but his portrait, rather than leavening Durkin’s conception of the character, curdles into reinforcement of it. Law pushes too hard to make Rory obnoxious. He’d have done better to use some of the charm he gave Dickie Greenleaf in The Talented Mr Ripley. At least we could then have seen Rory, even temporarily, as personally and professionally plausible.
There’s good work in the smaller parts from Adeel Akhtar, Michael Culkin and Anne Reid, and Oona Roche and Charlie Shotwell are both effective. The nature of Sam’s rebellion against her new life is a bit obvious – the evening that Rory and Allison are up in London, Sam lets the dodgy local teenagers she’s fallen in with take over the house; Allison returns early next morning to find the entrance paint-sprayed with abusive graffiti – but the tensions between mother and daughter are well played by Roche and Carrie Coon. And Ben’s decline is one of the most striking elements of the whole piece: a carefree kid in New York, he grows longer, thinner and more depressed in Surrey. The mansion, however, is something of a letdown. I wasn’t expecting – or wanting – a haunted house mystery. I think I was expecting more sense of connection between the family’s new, singular environment and the dégringolade that nearly destroys them. (Durkin made much more expressive use of the premises occupied by the cult in Martha Macy May Marlene). Mátyás Erdély, who shot Son of Saul (2015), is the cinematographer and his lighting is impressive throughout. Other aspects of the camerawork, though, become – like the film as a whole – progressively less interesting. In the early stages, Sean Durkin creates an impression of the characters being watched though they don’t know it. By the end of The Nest, the camera movement isn’t much more than hyperactive.
2 September 2021
