User Reviews

A young boy fights to keep his mother off of heroin in this gritty but hopeful film about addiction and family. The mother (Molly Parker) is nearly hopelessly in the grip of the drug, and her supplier Lenny (David Wenholm) does his absolute best to keep her in line. At risk of losing her children to their paternal grandparents for neglect, she tries to go cold turkey, but in a weak moment starts using again. Her son Paul (Harry Eden) tries to prevent Lenny from selling her more drugs, trying to step in between his addicted mother and her supplier, much like law enforcement seeks to do with a drug hungry society and a vicious underworld market run by ruthless cartels. The scale of the problem is reduced to a personal level but is quite exciting as well as emotional. Keira Knightley's role as Louise, a heroin addicted waitress who's also Paul's friend, leads to a night when he convinces her to let him try it out in order to know how it feels. It's quite a scene, as we watch in horror as our underage hero stares the enemy straight in the eye.

PURE - 2002 (Dir Gillies MacKinnon)

Reviewed By Ollie - Jan 2004

CONTAINS SPOILERS

Those who have seen the remarkable of performance of Harry Eden in `Real Men' will doubtless be familiar with his capable handling of powerful roles. `Pure' is British drama, set around a London based single mother and her two sons, Lee and Paul (as played by Eden). A promising start to the film shows young Paul preparing drugs for his heroin addicted mother, and handing her the syringe. A desolate look appears on his face as his mother confesses to having forgotten his birthday.

Billed as a gritty and powerful drama, this movie is good, but hardly outstanding. Eden's performance is superb, given the material he has to work with. For the best part of the film young Paul looks for all the world as though he is hardened to the situation in which he lives. There is a empty, tired and vacant gaze behind his eyes, reflecting the impact of living with a drug addicted parent.

The film is not without gentle touches of humour. The scene in which Mel (played adeptly by Molly Parker) hands over the child, Rose, to the doctor on the bus, is both sad, and gently amusing, as Paul glances back to the doctor warning him `don't give her pepperoni - it gives her the shits'.

From here the film delves into the world of heroin abuse, with detox scenes and the inevitable problems that arise from them. Unfortunately this is where the film is ultimately badly let down.

The film is good, but that's as far as it goes. It could have been so much better, and barely warrants its 18 certification. Harry Eden is an outstanding actor, and this film could have been such an opportunity to explore his vast potential. Sadly though, this role is a little like giving Michael Schumacher a Mini - you just know that Harry could have done so much with the part, given the chance. He is denied the opportunity to portray any real emotion - it is only in the last 15 minutes in which we see this world weary ten year old cry. Whether this is intentional is difficult to say, as the direction of the film doesn't have quite the impact to allow any true sense of desperation.

The detoxification is reasonably well handled, but is not shown with the impact that it would genuinely have. Overall, the main problem is that the film is too likeable, and nowhere near uncompromising enough given the subject matter. Paul's introduction to heroin, to `feel what his mother feels', seems to have been put in for shock value, and is unconvincing and unrealistic, and using it as his mothers inspiration for kicking her habit is clichéd, nearly as much as the family suggesting `pie and eels' for a celebration meal is a jaded and stereotyped image of `the real cockney'.

For all its faults though, `Pure' is a decent enough film, with characters you can warm to, and is generally a very likeable film. Sadly it is this likeability that detracts from the seriousness of the subject matter, and one cannot help but feel that Harry Eden is not given enough room to allow his character to develop. This means that the viewers are robbed of the opportunity to see this young actors remarkable talent at its full potential. A well earned 7.5/10 for this well meaning, but sugar coated movie, which could have been so much more...

Ollie

Maybe the name of Kira Knightley, after the world success of Pirates of the Caribbean was the main reason for this movie to be released as a DVD in the U.S. Even so, it's very interesting for whatever reason, to find this movie available and to have the chance to see an interesting British production. I said "interesting" but not really fully accomplished. The story is moving: an eleven year old kid who loves his young heroing addict mother and who fights for her recovery from drugs until he succeeds. Even so, the movie script makes nothing to make the characters sympathetic, especially in the case of Molly, the junkie mother. The kid, Harry Eden, is just a revelation (at least for me, though I have read that he is also exceptionally good in another movie called "Real Men") and delivers a realistic performing in every way, including his passionate and loving attachment to his mother. Unfortunately, the audience cannot see why is that mother so lovable and the fact that the kid gets "reunited" with her at the end seems awkward and off-putting instead of emotional.

Come on, the kid is just another example of the typical subservient relationship that addict or drunk parents develop with their kids. A relationship where the kids "wash, cook and clean" and in short take on themselves the obligation (instead of being the opposite way) to take care of their addicted parent. What are the assurances that this sick manner of relating to each other is not going to be perpetuated, especially when, during the movie, we have not seen any other kind of relationship being developed.

Besides that, the script fails miserably in the scene where the kid arranges the arrest of the drug dealer (David Wenham). Suddenly, without any explanation, we find out that the restaurant's owner is the big supplier of the drugs that have been used throughout the movie. Hey, that's just too easy and completely out of the blue. Besides that, the scene itself is just badly planned. Moreover, the final scene is just, to put it bluntly, stupid. Do you imagine social workers and relatives alike deciding by spontaneous voting if a "reformed junkie mother" should be reunited with her sons?

Even so, the good sections of this movie become a delightful experience because of Harry Eden's acting, which is always believable, always realistic. Especially remarkable are the scenes when he has his first sexual approaches with the character of Keira Kneightly and when he tries drugs for the first time in his life. Here we have the most convincing line of the whole movie, and which is the only natural development of what his mother has been doing to him: "Now I am like you, mom."

This film examines the pain of drug addiction through the eyes of youth. Molly Parker plays the young mum who can't get off "the gear" and the film is seen through the eyes of her young son who loves his mum but hates what the drugs do to her. The film is OK but not great. The performers all do well with what the script gives them but the film seems to lack something - it almost seems the film is script by numbers. All the usual drug clichés come out - the cold turkey scene, the evil dealer (played by David Wenham) and the death by overdose of one the characters. I don't know why the travails of drug addiction seems to interest film makers repeatedly - it certainly contains enough misery and human suffering which can make for fine drama - the problem with Pure, despite its confronting subject matter, the characters seemed poorly fleshed out. To this middle class art house viewer the film contrasted poorly with other films set in a similar depressing circumstances - eg the stunning Nil by Mouth.

On the plus side, the actors all do well - David Wenham has that man ever done a dud performance?

Just saw this on Sundance. loved it. beautiful acting, story, music, direction. Molly Parker is awesome once again. It was actually refreshing to see a movie where an addict actually beats her addiction. The scene where Mel (Molly Parker) sees her son (played wonderfully by Harry Eden) under the influence of heroine was especially touching.

It's taken a while for this British movie to make it to DVD in the USA, (I think it got a limited theatre release), so I feel slightly fraudulent reviewing it 4 years late. Was it worth waiting for? Hmmm. That's a toughie.

The problem is, I feel I ought to like this movie more than I do. It showcases a gut-wrenchingly good performance by Molly Parker as the heroin addicted mum Mel, an astonishingly good performance from young actor Harry Eden as the central character, her son Paul, very good support from two of my favorites actors, Keira Knightly as a young waitress, Louise, who befriends Paul, and David Wenham as the local big shot dealer Lenny, with smaller but effective roles by Gary Lewis and Geraldine McEwan.

I know this is a good movie; its production values were high, it's well acted, well scripted, more than adequately filmed on location in the East End, and has a very well-meaning and ethical story, about the redemptive power of love. Briefly, ten year old Paul runs a household under the shadow of West Ham United's Upton Park football ground in the multi-ethnic East End of London, while his mother struggles to admit she has a drug problem and then overcome it. Paul finally is instrumental in getting the local dealer "nicked", and in getting his mum to stick with re-hab and the family reunited. Yet I have to admit that I found it vaguely disappointing. A good TV drama, but I can see why it didn't get a wide theatre release.

If I was backed into a corner and forced to make comparisons, I might describe Pure as Vera Drake meets Trainspotting. But unfortunately, it doesn't have the impact of either. Pure lacks the black humour of Trainspotting which made that film such a cult classic, and which also made it so shocking. In Trainspotting, one moment the audience is laughing at this bunch of complete losers, and wondering if it really matters if idiots like this choose to kill themselves with drugs? The next moment we are shocked out of our seats by the death of the neglected baby which haunts the film. Pure also lacks Vera Drake's basic moral dilemma, namely is this inconspicuous, rather nice, kind woman Vera, really doing something wicked, when she performs do-it-yourself abortions on desperate volunteers? Does she really deserve to go to jail for it? After all, the rich get away with it. But in Pure, there are no such contradictions or doubts, and really no great moral dilemma for the audience to wrestle with. As shown here, heroin addiction is awful. It has no redeeming features. People die unpleasantly or mess up their lives. Drug addicts make lousy parents. But I think I knew that already. It showed us the intimate details of the devastation that drugs can wreak on a family, but it didn't really say anything new. There is no doubt that the pimp / dealer Lenny is nasty, that the child Paul is heroic and that his mum wants, at some level, to be a decent parent. The film is really just confirming for the audience what most of us already knew.

Lenny probably says the only mildly contentious lines in the whole movie, when he says (and I'm paraphrasing) "Heroin doesn't make people's lives lousy, it just helps them cope with the lousy lives they already have." That might have been an interesting lead to follow; why did Mel get into this state? OK, she was widowed young, but plenty of women are widowed young and don't become junkies. Lenny gets his come-uppance, (he deserved jail for his Argyle sweaters alone, never mind the drug dealing...), mum gets off heroin and Paul gets his family back. It's all very well presented and yet it doesn't make for great drama, with the possible exception of the scene where Paul attacks Lenny's Audi with a brick and then lays into Lenny. I'm struggling really to pin it down, but Pure didn't quite work for me.

One level on which it failed for me was the incredibly banal soundtrack. I watched Pure with my 16 year old son, (I often use my kids as sounding boards for movies, because I realize as a middle aged woman I'm not a statistically important part of the demographic) and he said the soundtrack reminded him of a movie he saw recently called Grizzly Man, in which a guy goes to study bears in Alaska and gets eaten by one. Certainly to me, the sound track seemed more reminiscent of the National Geographic Channel than the East End of London. A sound track should enhance the movie or else not be there at all. I found Pure's intensely irritating and rather trite, and felt most of the best scenes were the ones without any music.

All the performances were faultless. It was an interesting role for Keira Knightly, Molly Parker and Harry Eden were superb, and Australian David Wenham proved again that he does a great turn as a thug. (He also nailed the accent perfectly, which I find interesting. Because this is where I have to admit that I'm an Essex Girl myself and I grew up not far from where this movie is set. Although I've been away from London for 30 years, and living in California for 9 of those, I still retain a slight Essex accent. And yet here in California I'm frequently asked by the locals what part of Australia I'm from. I guess the accents are closer than I'd realized.) I watched Pure twice in case I picked up some interesting nuances second time that I missed first time, but no. It did nothing more for me second time around. Well meaning movie, but not especially memorable unfortunately. I'd watch it in preference to most of the dross on TV here, but I can't pretend it's a great film. Sorry...!

"Pure" is a story about disintegrated families, victims of the drug addiction. Mel (Molly Parker), after the death of her husband, becomes a junkie, and leaves the fate of her family into the hands of Lenny (David Wenham), Upton Park's local pimp and drug dealer. Paul (Harry Eden), Mel's ten year old son, is the main hero who tries his best to ensure the safety of his younger brother, and the health of the helpless parent. In spite of Paul's efforts to stop mom's dependence on heroin, Mel does little to keep her family together. Only at the sight of her stoned child she decides to give up, and predictably succeeds.

Gilles MacKinnon ("Regeneration") creates a film in which the moods of the character are expressed elegantly in the use of intense colours being juxtaposed to blurred ones; drama and passion are juxtaposed to comedy and joy – all creating a mixed psychological tableau, in which the parents need to be taken cared of, and the children excel in their moral superiority. Alison Hume's script, based on a detailed research of drug-addicted mothers in Leeds, tries to combine the independence of the capital with the community spirit present within West Ham's supporters, in order to achieve the dramatic impact expected from films that tackle similar themes.

The effect is far from expected. Although Harry Eden tries his best to impress in his struggle between understanding of and love for his mother, there is still quite a bit to go to challenge Haley Joel Osment. Arguably most characters tend to seclude too easily into stereotypes, and remain shadowed by the overall picture. The only decent cast is Molly Parker ("Kissed", "Men with Brooms"), who manages a most memorable performance, particularly when she ends up admitting: "I know I am a s**t mother. I never say it, but I always think that. I love you". At the end of the day she proves that "a junkie mom is better than no mom".

"Pure" is a film that would appeal mainly to the families with similar experiences, but may be of little interest to the general public. The one touching thing is the soothing soundtrack, which tends to give an optimistic feeling to the story in the lively piano tune. Otherwise, the film is too pure to be disembodied, though many might disagree. After all the Berlin International Film Festival Jury had to have a few good reasons to honour it with two Manfred Salzgeber Awards.

This is an emotionally charged film with superb acting as many of the other reviewers have indicated.

It is also extremely well crafted; great sound, camera work and editing.

This is fiction with a purpose beyond entertainment; it provides a glimpse into the world of drug addiction and the ripple effects that few know first hand but many denounce at arms length.

Although it has noble intents, it is a bit manipulative in that it pulls out all the strings to make a viewer empathize with the main character's plight (if the main character wasn't a child, or if the addict didn't have any family I doubt the story would be as affective). And, perhaps the ending could have been cropped to leave open questions instead of forging a resolution.

Nevertheless, it's a great film. And, definitely one worth watching.