BRIGHTON ROCK
BRIGHTON ROCK, directed by Rowan Joffe; starring Sam Riley, Helen Mirren, John Hurt, Andrea Riseborough; 1hr 51min; Rated MA
IT IS NO doubt an irreverent thought – and I should have been focusing on the film. (I was trying, but this is a very slow and sobersides affair with lots of longeurs where distracting matters loomed large: how many other gangland films did this remind me of? How can Helen Mirren so easily summon up sexy in her 60s? What might I have for dinner later?) But mostly I couldn’t help thinking about how much more fun it would be if the laugh-it-up lads from Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels turned up to mix it with the grim crims from Brighton in this gorgeously mounted and completely cheerless affair.
Lennie the Guv’nor, Bacon, Soap and Barry the Baptist (who earned his nickname by drowning people), might have lowered the tone a bit, but in the post-Tarantino era we’re conditioned to expect a bit of the raucously ratty with our gangland adventures. And notwithstanding that this film is set in the 60s (updated from the 40s original based on Graham Greene’s novel) and determined, above all, to be period perfect in its re-creation of the seedier backblocks of the famous seaside resort, it really is hard to accept characters doing scrunched-up faces and overblown menace, delivering the kind of hard-boiled dialogue that has by now become almost a send-up of itself.
And they do play it that way. And the violence that goes with it is also played dead straight and nasty – though the weapons of choice are shivs rather than shooters. And while it’s very possible that another, better film might still pick up on these familiar elements and pull them together in an enthralling story that makes us forget all about the more recent pop culture derivatives – this is not that film.
There is something rather laboured and self conscious about Brighton Rock from the time it gets underway – starting, as it means to finish, with some viciously ugly violence. And that’s despite the film’s classy look, (Ridley Scott’s cinematographerJohn Mathieson contributes some luscious visuals – those chalky cliffs looming above the sea have rarely looked finer), and the fact that several of the performers are indisputably top notch.
Helen Mirren is as watchable as you’d expect as the feisty, if not so femme fatale as she used to be tea-shop owner, who decides to fight back when the psychotic young Pinky (Sam Riley) upends the status quo on the local crime scene. And young Andrea Riseborough gives a standout performance as the rather gormless waitress Pinky successfully cons into an affair, when he realizes she has inadvertently witnessed events that could land him on the gallows.
John Hurt has only a small role as one of the promenade’s seniors who is an old friend of Ida’s, but his brief scenes with Mirren – the sorts of small treasures these legends can conjure up in a blink – are like beacons in a grey landscape. Riley, in the central role, can convey very little, constrained as he is by the requirement to remain locked into a dead-eyed, blank-faced stare, and by a script that makes only glancing forays into the backstory about guilt, religion, fear, and whatever else Graham Greene might have had on his mind, for which a reading of the novel would be a better idea.
Translating the story into the 60s setting brings its own set of problems, notably that without writing into the script any helpful tips on the social history of the times, the film indulges in protracted mob scenes featuring face-offs between the leather-jacketed Rockers of the day and the Mods, with their neat Beatle hair cuts, shirts, ties and motor scooters. It’s an obvious stretch to make the film’s gangland storyline – and its young gangsters for that matter – fit into that backdrop. It was inexplicable even then, to us out here in the colonies – where the Mods/Rockers scene was way more marginal – and it was clearly beyond the younger audience members I heard departing from the film wondering what all that was about.
But none of the problems the film has is as serious as the fatal flaw of giving the audience nothing and no one to care about. And that’s Storytelling 101. Everything that is happening is grim, and pretty much everyone is unpleasant. There is very little change of tone, and no relieving moments of warmth or humour amid the sleaze. Who would have thought you could go to a highbrow movie with a classy cast and a story based on a Graham Greene novel and find yourself longing for Jason Statham.
