While watching this fascinating coming-of-age drama set in urban Scotland during the mid-'70s, you can't help but flash on BILLY ELLIOT. But despite many shared parallels, RATCATCHER is much less a feel-good, you-go-boy movie, more an extremely sensitive, sometimes brutally realistic portrayal of a lad with a secret and how he ultimately comes to terms with it. It's a deeper, more emotionally complex film, blessed with a languid tempo and a plethora of symbolic images sure to inspire rumination for weeks to come.
Twelve-year-old James (William Eadie) is living in a Glasgow slum during a months-long garbage strike. The rats are the only ones faring well during this bleak summer, captured in a dark documentary style in which the camera lingers long on surfaces, expressions, symbols. James' Da (Tommy Flanagan) is an unemployed alcoholic whose only use for his son is to fetch beer; his Ma (Mandy Matthews) is the resigned Al-Anon who loves her family but is hamstrung by her hardscrabble existence. The kids play, vent their anger, and even eat lunch in the stinking rubbish heaps.
[plot spoiler] One day while James swims with his friend Ryan in the canal, they play too rough and the boy drowns. As James battles his guilt, we watch the trash bags pile up, the vermin proliferate, and the boy become keenly aligned with the bleakness of his surroundings. We witness all the usual cruelty of childhood-the taunts, bullying, put-downs-but seen through this guilt-wracked boy's eyes, they become almost as unbearable as his growing alienation from himself and his family. Accents are brick thick, but the film thoughtfully provides English subtitles so you can differentiate `p**s off' from `w**k off' from `fook off.'
But even in this wretched environment, small bits of love do surface, breaking ground like flowers through cement walkways. James meets the awkwardly flirtatious Margaret Anne (Leanne Mullen), another sensitive soul, who seeks the local boys' approval by gang-banging them. The pair bond around their respective wounds, and while bubble-bathing with Margaret, James laughs for the only time during the film.
The boy also forms a tentative bond with innocent Kenny (John Miller), dubbed `the wee spastic b***ard' by the other kids because of his extreme love of animals, speech impediment, and some general squirliness that's hard to diagnose. He may be the village naif, but he ultimately discerns the truth of James' situation-and James the truth of his-and both confront each other in ways that allow them to accept reality. Kenny launches the film's most amazing image: a white mouse tied to a moon-bound helium balloon.
James becomes keenly aware of the squalor he lives in as he watches his `half-cut' father, drunk to drooling, slur `I love you' to Ma while Tom Jones rocks the Beeb. But his redemption dream comes in the guise of a new house that a city agency has promised the family. In several beautifully transcendent scenes, James rides the bus to the end of the line, where a spate of such new homes are under construction. He tumbles through the big open field before them, takes a whiz in a brand-new toilet, and absorbed in revelry, kicks a can all the way home.
Driven purely by images and emotional content, RATCATCHER is an auspicious debut by Glaswegian writer/director Lynne Ramsay, whose sensitive eye reminds us how truly excruciating childhood's tortures can be. It's a thoroughly outstanding production, from Rachel Portman's minimalist score to the wonderfully slow pacing to memorable performances by a cast of mostly newcomers.
Bravo.
Twelve-year-old James (William Eadie) is living in a Glasgow slum during a months-long garbage strike. The rats are the only ones faring well during this bleak summer, captured in a dark documentary style in which the camera lingers long on surfaces, expressions, symbols. James' Da (Tommy Flanagan) is an unemployed alcoholic whose only use for his son is to fetch beer; his Ma (Mandy Matthews) is the resigned Al-Anon who loves her family but is hamstrung by her hardscrabble existence. The kids play, vent their anger, and even eat lunch in the stinking rubbish heaps.
[plot spoiler] One day while James swims with his friend Ryan in the canal, they play too rough and the boy drowns. As James battles his guilt, we watch the trash bags pile up, the vermin proliferate, and the boy become keenly aligned with the bleakness of his surroundings. We witness all the usual cruelty of childhood-the taunts, bullying, put-downs-but seen through this guilt-wracked boy's eyes, they become almost as unbearable as his growing alienation from himself and his family. Accents are brick thick, but the film thoughtfully provides English subtitles so you can differentiate `p**s off' from `w**k off' from `fook off.'
But even in this wretched environment, small bits of love do surface, breaking ground like flowers through cement walkways. James meets the awkwardly flirtatious Margaret Anne (Leanne Mullen), another sensitive soul, who seeks the local boys' approval by gang-banging them. The pair bond around their respective wounds, and while bubble-bathing with Margaret, James laughs for the only time during the film.
The boy also forms a tentative bond with innocent Kenny (John Miller), dubbed `the wee spastic b***ard' by the other kids because of his extreme love of animals, speech impediment, and some general squirliness that's hard to diagnose. He may be the village naif, but he ultimately discerns the truth of James' situation-and James the truth of his-and both confront each other in ways that allow them to accept reality. Kenny launches the film's most amazing image: a white mouse tied to a moon-bound helium balloon.
James becomes keenly aware of the squalor he lives in as he watches his `half-cut' father, drunk to drooling, slur `I love you' to Ma while Tom Jones rocks the Beeb. But his redemption dream comes in the guise of a new house that a city agency has promised the family. In several beautifully transcendent scenes, James rides the bus to the end of the line, where a spate of such new homes are under construction. He tumbles through the big open field before them, takes a whiz in a brand-new toilet, and absorbed in revelry, kicks a can all the way home.
Driven purely by images and emotional content, RATCATCHER is an auspicious debut by Glaswegian writer/director Lynne Ramsay, whose sensitive eye reminds us how truly excruciating childhood's tortures can be. It's a thoroughly outstanding production, from Rachel Portman's minimalist score to the wonderfully slow pacing to memorable performances by a cast of mostly newcomers.
Bravo.