Upon being released from custody for some petty larceny, Ben and his son Karl, small time gangsters both, return home more or less in silence for an awkward couple of beers and stale pound-cake with their mates. Karl's girlfriend comes by to celebrate, but her belly belies a quite pregnant figure. Karl's reaction is perfect in its purity: "Fuck!" The following, well that's that then on the surface, panic very much underneath, encapsulates the dysfunction and overall incompetence of the men in the family, and how they project their issues upon themselves and their kin. Nobody does people behaving badly towards one another with a low key passive-aggressive narcissism (played for pathos and laughs, naturally) quite like the Brits. Equal parts sitcom-from-hell and verite-family-drama, Down Terrace makes the most of its low budget and limited location by virtue of a wonderful collection of actors and non-actors ripping each other to shreds (both figuratively, literally) due to far to close proximity. Insofar as Reservoir Dogs is a heist movie without the heist, Down Terrace is a gangster picture without the gangster stuff, trading instead in uncomfortable family anxieties and loaded banter until things come to a head. If the film came out in the Sundance heyday of Quentin Tarnantino and Kevin Smith, writer-director Ben Wheatley would quite likely be a made man.
Posturing, bantering, sparring on
screen as an insight to character, relationships and story is a delicate
thing. As Nic Cage finds out in (underrated) The Weatherman,
catching hell from the wife for forgetting the mayonnaise at the corner
shop, is never about forgetting the mayonnaise, but a small release of
pent-up-shit stemming from dozens of years of existing together under
the same roof. Most of the film takes place in a house in Brighton,
Karl lives at home with Mum and Dad and participates in the family
business) with a steady stream of low-lives coming in to drink, talk,
play a little blue-collar folk guitar and occasionally (very
occasionally) talk business. This is the lay of the land for watching
the three way family dynamic of Bill, Maggie and Karl. Everything is a
slippery slope, like trying to juggle oil.
Sure
there is some sort of rat to be sniffed out, some pressure from London
about Bill's ability to hold his small corner of the world together, all
these are external pressures are the triggers to see how these
characters snipe, self-flagellate and silently plea for intimacy (think
David Thewlis' Johnny in Naked with Pete Postlewaith's posture
and face). Bill is a well read, ex-hippie who cannot seem to make a
good (or final) decision about anything. The man probably has not made
his own cup of tea or bite of supper in decades, although can
pontificate like a champ. His verbose monologues on anything from toxin
cleansing diets to radical drug-induced visions (note the contradiction
there!) are a thing to behold, particularly considering that this is
from a non-actor (Robert Hill) who is actually the father of his co-star
and the films co-writer (Robin Hill) in real life. It seems that
Wheatley, and advertising and TV veteran, has been directing loads of
these types of 'near-reality' short films with Robin and Robert for
years and Down Terrace would be the ultimate culmination a
lifetime of rehearsal. The film is actually shot in Robert's own house.
It allows for a certain comfort of familiar surroundings for most of
the creative parties involved to get into some pretty nasty, heavy
business. Within the story, that would be demolishing his sons ego to
prop up his own set of guilt and anxieties. One can only imagine how
many echoes of real conflict are leavened into those performances. And
the movie contains a lot of fathers and sons, and anxieties of raising
junior right. It gives an interesting foundation for a film that starts
layering on a surprising body count in the final third. In a further
revelation of subtlety and nuance, TV's Spaced landlord Julia
Deakin plays Maggie, the distant, yet still controlling matron that
indulges her son's angry freakouts and her husbands
passive-aggressiveness because she is rather above it all. Does she
really love either of them, or is she just comfortable with the state
things have evolved into over the years? This is played in a darkly
comic fashion. Not the laugh out loud, gag-payoff-gag rhythm of a
standard comedy, but the more react to the audacity and forthright with
which peoples anxieties and over-compensation is laid out front and
center. Deakin shows it all with her face, body language, and a portent
conversation with one of the crime families London bosses. The awkward
comedy made famous worldwide by those fly-on-the-wall Britcoms like The Office and The Thick of It may allow for North American audiences to get into the headspace of Down Terrace,
but it does not quite prepare for just how far Wheatley and Hill are
going to go. Winning acclaim at a number of festivals, including best
screenplay and best first feature at Austin's FantasticFest (no small
feat that, as festival that plays mostly zany and unusual horror,
fantasy and science-fiction films), Down Terrace is certainly a
film that proves that comedy is a matter of individual taste and
sensibility, but there is certainly a growing audience for this type of
thoughtful hybrid. The communal libation is an Alkaseltzer tablet in
water, a worthy image of all ulcer inducing bile sent forth in the name
of getting along with one oneself and ones own. Perhaps the greatest
tragedy is that the small family considers itself "No better or worse
than anybody else." For all of Karl's exhaustion with his fathers
bullshit and his mothers seeming indifference, he is clearly going to
end up exactly like them both. And there is a child on the way. Now
that is comedy.