To many moviegoers, (myself included) Robert Carlyle will always be the middle-aged, foul-mouthed killer Francis Begbie from Trainspotting. Which is unfair really, as he's played a variety of other roles too, but after many years of trying to shake the image, he's finally taken the directorial reins and stars now as the middle-aged, foul-mouthed killer Barney Thomson.
This film follows the eponymous Barney, a Glaswegian barber on the verge of a mid-life crisis, whose life and sanity begin to unravel when he accidentally kills his boss moments after being sacked from his job. Because the death looks so obviously like a murder, and because the Glasgow Police are simulateously trying to track a prolific serial killer, Barney decides to get rid of the body with a minimum of fuss. It's then that help arrives from a most unexpected source…
Wonderfully scripted, acted directed and photographed, TLoBT is one of those comedies which will work best for audiences with a dry/twisted sense of humour (cf.Sightseers). In fact, it's probably not unfair to say that the collective cinematic result is far stronger than the story itself. In many ways, the film is a bit too low-key for a directorial debut and feels almost hesitant, despite its overt language, humour and ghoulish subject matter. But Carlyle shows he's really An Actor's Director, and this film is all about the performances (and in that respect, he doesn't give himself an easy ride, either). Ray Winstone plays a very good Ray Winstone as the browbeaten police inspector tracking the serial-killer case, and Emma Thompson is having a lot of fun (and brilliantly) as Barney's foul-mouthed, bingo-addicted mum. But the standout performance for me was Tom Courtenay as Chief Superintendent McManaman, whose soft, Alan Bennett-esque tones belie some of the finest comedic scripting I've heard this year.
Both visually and thematically, The Legend of Barney Thomson is very much like a head-on collision between Trainspotting and Mr Jolly Lives Next Door, and Cinematographer Fabian Wagner's camera captures the urban claustrophobia of East-end Glasgow terrifyingly well. The streets are desaturated, but the film carries enough energy that walking through them never seems like hard work (and if anything, you just want to walk faster so you can be off them). The overbearing grimness of the tale is held at bay by Carlyle's hand, and I look forward to his future projects.
It's not all plain sailing, however. As I've mentioned, the narrative itself seems almost undercooked, not quite making the leap from page to screen. I suspect the books will be just as enjoyable, but for different reasons, having time to paint the surroundings (and supporting characters) more fully. The film just about pulls it off, but you get the feeling it's scrabbling to fill its already-brief 96 minutes. Other aspects, like Barney's first-person narration, are so under-used as to be pointless.
On a more technical front, the incidental music is too loud in the mix, as is much of the background noise, and vast swathes of dialogue disappear through mumbling. And it's not the Glaswegian accents, it's the mumbling. There's the distinct possibility that it was just the audio setup in the screen, of course, but I've had no previous with the cinema in question. Oh, and shouldn't there be some sort of law against a cinema showing a 2.35:1 aspect-ratio film in a 16:9 setup auditorium? The aforementioned Mr. Wagner didn't work his bollocks off making this film look grimily fantastic so that it can be shoved on the only available screen as an afterthought, with black bars projected at the top and bottom ;)
If you only see one movie this year which features interior and exterior shots of Glasgow Barrowlands, make it The Legend of Barney Thomson.
If you can find it near you, sure. That said…
Well, as much fun as the film is, its sparse release-schedule means that you'll probably end up watching it on DVD with a bottle of wine one Sunday night; a task for which it's absolutely ideal.
Well, Robert Carlyle will always be Begbie to me, but he's also very good in this.
Given that it almost runs out of story, yes.
I won't.
There isn't.
This film stars Robert Carlyle, James Cosmo and Finlay Welsh, all three of whom appeared in 1996's Trainspotting alongside Ewan 'Kenobi' McGregor.
(All roads lead to Kenobi, today.)
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
Hey, I enjoy a musical from time to time. I can't claim I like all musicals, in much the same way as I can't claim to like all sci-fi or all horror. And that, my friends, is the crux of my problem with Sunshine on Leith. I just don't think it's that good at what it's doing.
To be fair, I only had two real gripes with the film, but as those were a) the story and b) the music, that was enough to de-rail the entire thing for me. I don't think the plot itself is stong enough to warrant building an entire 100 minutes around, or that it's particularly well told for what it is. When we're introduced to Ally and Davy at the start, it's in that way which suggests we'll be spending the entire film with these characters, not that one of them (the one who's slightly more interesting) will be essentially written off before the third act. Not killed off; nothing that interesting, he just says in one scene that he's going to re-join the army, and then he does. No inner turmoil, no insight; just a scared young man with PTSD deciding to go back to a life-threatening situation, mistaking familiarity for safety. But let's not spend time exploring that, there's A Scottish Man here who's been told he might have to go into England one day, and
now he's throwing his toys out of the pram over it (and it is a shame, because there's a great chemistry between George MacKay and Antonia Thomas, and between George and Kevin Guthrie, which is wasted in this).
A similar situation exists with Freya Mavor's character Liz, whose ultimate purpose in the script seems to be moving to America, facilitating the sending of letters, and a song based solely around that act. There's no tearful airport scene, by the way. One moment she's humming and haahing about emigrating to Florida, and 15 minutes later she's there (albeit for one solitary shot). We know she's in America because it's sunny and there are fat people in the background. I love visual storytelling, me.
By the time you've tacked on Jean (Jane Horrocks) and Rab (Peter Mullan) having an extended domestic over what is suggested for the first half of the film to be Mullan's previous relationship, and in the second half as a one-night-stand (and the addition of Jason Flemyng's half-written character apparently stepping in from some other musical entirely), the whole thing's a bit of a mess, frankly. There's a faint whiff of the anti-English rhetoric which seems to have found its way in by default rather than design; but as the resolution of the plotlines between Davy/Yvonne and Rab/Jean is essentially a patronising 'I'm glad you've come round to seeing things my way, woman', I think the film has larger issues than defiant Saltire-waving.
But hey, Sunshine On Leith is a musical, and it'd be remiss of me to treat it like the socially conscious drama it isn't. I like The Proclaimers. I can't go so far as calling myself 'a fan', but I do enjoy them on an unironic level. Great song structure, great harmonies, what's not to love? Well, the problem is that a large number of their songs only work when they're performed by The Proclaimers, which they're not in this. Some of the arrangements work well (despite the clunkiness of its presence, Letter From America sounds great), but for the most part it feels like karaoke. It's also worth pointing out that while getting English actors to speak in a consistently convincing Scottish accent is no doubt a challenge, getting them to sing in one seems almost impossible. That said, Peter Mullan's droning singing manages to distract from the worst offenders, here.
So obviously there are The Hits in here, as well as songs which the average punter will be less familiar, which is all fair enough. But in addition to the patchy arrangements, the songs don't tell the story as such, they only seem to be there because the script has cued them up ('Hey, The Proclaimers have a song called 'Oh Jean'. If we call one of our characters Jean we can put that in there and it'll be seamless, I tell you. Seamless.'). I'm aware that this is generally how jukebox-musicals work, but in all honesty Mamma Mia! has a more effective song/story symbiosis than Sunshine on Leith. Yeah, I went there.
You sort of get the feeling that this was either a cheap cash-in, or the outcome of a bet that Stephen Greenhorn couldn't write a musical around The Proclaimers' songs. Either way, the end result seems to have been more important than the craft. I didn't expect to like Sunshine on Leith, but I was hoping I'd at least be able to respect it more.
It kind of is.
Rarely.
I genuinely have no idea.
Give it a year and it'll be on rotation on ITV2.
Erm, yeah.
Not likely.
There is not.
When Craig Proclaimer and Charlie Proclaimer did their walk-on cameo three minutes into the film, did anyone else's toes curl so hard that they tore their shoes? That shit would make Stan Lee blush...
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
