Paddy Considine (2011)
In their interview in this month’s Sight and Sound, Paddy Considine and Peter Mullan, who plays the lead in Tyrannosaur, disparage social realism in film-making, Mullan more aggressively than Considine. Mullan illustrates the potential falsity of realism not with any example of dramatic screen fiction but with TV ‘reality’ shows that he rightly sees as skewed and manipulative. Mullan goes on to remind the interviewer Nick Bradshaw, that any choice he (Bradshaw) makes in conducting the interview is a ‘political act’. Using something like Big Brother as a stick with which to beat cinematic realism doesn’t do a lot for Mullan’s argument but this is something he clearly feels strongly about. As Bradshaw notes, this latest interview picks up where the S&S piece with Mullan on Neds at the start of the year left off. In Neds, Mullan uses social realism as a take-off point for imaginative unrealistic elements. That’s not what happens in Tyrannosaur, the first feature directed by Paddy Considine and which Considine also wrote.
This unhappy story – set in present day Leeds, about the lives and relationships of Joseph (Mullan), a middle-aged widower who struggles to control his drinking and his rage, Hannah (Olivia Colman), a practising Christian who works in a charity shop, and James (Eddie Marsan), her physically and psychologically abusive husband – stays rooted in reality, in the sense that the film depends crucially on the audience’s believing that everything we see happening on screen might really be happening. In the first half of the film, Considine sustains this belief very well. But as the dramatic climax of Tyrannosaur approaches, you become increasingly aware that he’s pushing things too far in order to intensify the misery of the characters’ situation and the emotional power deriving from that. In the S&S piece, Considine and Mullan emphasise the primacy of ‘emotional truth’. (In Neds the fantastic sequences enriched the emotional truth that developed in the realistic ground of the film.) But what kind of truth is it that’s conveyed through situations which you know to be contrived for emotional effect? There’s no doubting the fine, often moving performances in this film or that Paddy Considine directs the actors with a sure and sensitive touch, or his skill in writing incisive naturalistic dialogue, but Tyrannosaur is too determinedly grim.
Considine’s previous film as a director was the prize-winning short Dog Altogether (2007), which introduced the character of Joseph (Mullan played him there too and Olivia Colman played a different role). According to Wikipedia, the phrase ‘dog altogether’ comes ‘from an Irish expression that Paddy’s father used to use when situations got really bad’. It’s the culmination of the canine part of the story in Tyrannosaur that shows in its most blatant form Considine’s tendency to force the material in order to pile on the grief. At the start of the film, in his first outburst of fury, Joseph takes his anger out on his dog, kicking it so hard in the ribs that the animal dies. Joseph’s neighbours have a pit bull; this dog, like Joseph (and like the man who owns it), is always straining on its leash, looking keen to take a bite out of someone. After the death of Joseph’s own dog (and with his only human pal terminally ill), the young son of the neighbouring family is the only person with whom he has friendly conversation. In the epilogue to the film, which takes place a year after the main action, Joseph writes a letter to Hannah, who’s now in prison for killing the husband whose abuse she could no longer stand. Joseph explains that he too has been inside in the meantime – for unlawfully (and savagely) killing the neighbour’s pit bull. He was driven to do this by the fact that the animal had attacked the little boy Joseph had befriended – the boy’s face was left badly scarred as a result. But surely the boy had to go to hospital for treatment, surely the cause of his wounds became clear, and surely the dog would have been humanely destroyed as a result? That both these things should happen is implausible and the only emotional truth here is that Paddy Considine wants to have his cake and eat it: he wants the child’s damaged face and Joseph’s lethal attack on the dog.
It’s her upmarket address which allows Joseph to inform Hannah, in one of their early exchanges in the charity shop, that she knows nothing about how hard life can be; but he’s wrong, and one of the strongest elements in Tyrannosaur is how Considine dramatises the democracy of unhappiness and isolation. Perhaps that’s the justification for none of the neighbours noticing the lack of activity at the house in the period between Hannah’s escape from it and Joseph’s eventual discovery of James’s dead body, a fly buzzing round it, in an upstairs room. But we’re led to believe James has a good job – does no one at his place of work notice or question his absence? Is Hannah a Christian on her own? It’s possible but it also clearly suits Considine’s purposes that no one from church wonders where she’s got to. Nor do any of the people who work at the charity shop (she surely can’t run it that on her own). But then we never see them or indeed any customers, apart from Joseph – and James, who comes in one day to check up on Hannah and leaves with his paranoid suspicions confirmed that the ‘slut’ is being unfaithful to him with Joseph. We do, though, hear the voice of a woman who comes in with some clothes to donate. Olivia Colman is wonderful in that scene as she switches with great but unseen effort from weeping in the back of the shop to brightly affable performance as she talks with the unseen woman.
The bleakness of the world of Tyrannosaur is enhanced by how unbelievably few people there are in it – the depopulation goes with the landscapes both man-made and natural, especially the dark, leafless trees. It’s no coincidence that the only sequence in the film with any sense of joy comes when Joseph and Hannah are drinking and dancing along with others (albeit at Joseph’s friend’s wake!) Hannah’s Christianity is a potentially strong element which gets lost in the story. Her politely resilient defence of her faith, when Joseph derides it, is very truthful. He’s so impressed that he asks her to pray at the bedside of his dying friend. This prayer is exceptionally well written (‘We know that life is just a part of existence, and death is eternal’ is thought-provoking), and beautifully delivered by Olivia Colman. It’s a strong moment too when, at the end of her tether in the charity shop, Hannah hurls something at a picture of Christ hanging on the wall, and yells, ‘What are you staring at?!’ Having introduced this distinctive theme, Considine doesn’t seem to know what to do with it. He doesn’t even have Hannah discover that her faith is useless, or a delusion that allows her to cope with her unhappy life. He’s careless about other details in the script and their conflict with what we’re watching on screen. When Joseph asks Hannah why she can’t tell her friends and family about what her husband’s doing, she says that no one would believe her, that James knows how to turn on the charm and they all think he’s perfect. With Eddie Marsan in the role of James (although he’s very good), this is impossible to believe.
Peter Mullan is very fine at showing Joseph’s fear of getting close to Hannah, or to anyone, after the death of the wife he loved – but who, he tells Hannah, he treated badly. It’s also amusing and touching that, dressed in the charity shop suit he got for his friend’s funeral, he looks so distinguished. Olivia Colman is still best known for her television comedy work with Mitchell and Webb but her performance here should change that. She and Mullan make the most of the crumbs of humour in Tyrannosaur but Colman goes way beyond what we’ve previously seen of her. She’s marvellous at putting a brave, smiley face on things – the habit seems to run so deep in Hannah that Colman gets us (almost) to believe that this woman could kill her husband, leave the house, and think she could put what she’d done behind her. Tyrannosaur majors on different strands of inherent masculine violence so the explanation of its title comes as a pleasant surprise. It’s the meant-to-be-affectionate name Joseph called his heavily-built late wife: her footfall upstairs reminded him of a something in Jurassic Park. It’s a pity that, by the time you come out of the film, you feel a more apt title would have been As Bad as It Gets.
11 October 2011
