A film review by Craig J. Koban June 22, 2010 |
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Rank: #5 |
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FISH TANK
Mia: Katie Jarvis / Connor: Michael Fassbender / Joanne: Kierston
Wareing / Tyler: Rebecca Griffiths / Billy: Harry Treadaway |
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Andrea Arnold’s FISH TANK is one of the most stunningly focused and bleak coming-of-age dramas that I’ve seen. The film is astounding for its minimalist power: shot with a loose, improvisational spirit, an intricate attention to urban environmental details, and a genuine sense of intensity with its characters and performances, FISH TANK takes a hard look at genre conventions and clichés and brazenly slaps them all down. On
the surface, the film could be taken a prosaic melodrama, but what Arnold
has done with familiar material is revelatory.
She creates such an uncomfortable sensation of realism and urgency
with her portrait of an inarticulate, perpetually angry, and fiercely
anti-social teenager, so much so that the more the film progresses,
the less aware we are that we are watching a drama.
Instead, the film makes the audience members feel like
eavesdropping voyeurs, and it is that astounding level of gritty
verisimilitude that triumphantly segregates it from the other similar
efforts. The
film is unrelentingly dark and pessimistic: it offers an
unflinchingly fly-on-the wall portrait of one highly dysfunctional British
family and – more acutely – one disaffected youth, and it does so
without the obligatory sermonizing or lame sentimentality.
I have often complained about dramas that feel like their
screenplays have been sanitized by massive dosages of Lysol being sprayed
all over them: they attempt to either overly romanticizes their respective
characters or they make attempts to meditate on them by
laboriously explaining what makes them tick.
Arnold does the exact opposite, which is ultimately what makes her
film so calculatingly honest and profound.
She quickly introduces us to her irreproachably hostile and
pessimistic teen rebel and then proceeds to show the entire film through
her eyes. We see how she
interacts with people, how she speaks to them, how she responds to them,
and how she perceives them. No
attempt whatsoever is made by Arnold to justify, rationalize, or apologize
for this character. What
we get is a harrowing, intimate, and frequently chilling portrait of
adolescent aggression, fury, and frustration.
The film’s title is symbolic of its aesthetic choices: we look at
this pathetic creature as spectators, seeing her at her most redundant, but experiencing
her at her most mundane is what
makes FISH TANK so emotionally alive and authentic.
For
Mia (Katie Jarvis), her teen years are an unyielding prison of
aggravation. She is a
perpetually potty-mouthed 15-year-old Essex girl that lives in one of the
more dilapidated housing projects in the U.K.
Her home life is depressingly austere:
her mother (Kierston Wareing) is a slutty, booze-binging, and
uncaring piece of Euro trash that has no business being a maternal figure.
Mia’s kid sister (Rebecca Griffiths) is also an aggressively unfriendly figure in the household (she throws out c-bombs at her mother
and sister with a shocking nonchalance that would easily make KICK-ASS’
Hit-Girl blush). Outside of
Mia's inescapably bitter home is life on the street and her attempts to socialize and make friends are abysmal failures.
Early on in the film she lambastes a group of female street dancers
so badly that it results in her vengefully head-butting one in the face, drawing
blood. With a family unit that
is toxic, a social life that is a loner-fuelled void, and a school life
that is not even on the radar, Mia retreats into solitude and drinking. She
does have only one outlet that appears to be a calming influence on her:
she loves hip-hop street dancing, and when she is not engaging in caustic
verbal tirades with her family and strangers, she escapes into an
abandoned flat, plays CDs on a portable player, and practices her moves
so that she could perhaps leave her life of misery and poverty once and
for all. She is neither a
prodigy nor untalented, but what she does have is a genuine desire to do
well at something, which, considering her situation, is a good
proposition. She sees a local
flyer advertising for dancers and she immediately puts that on her radar. Things
get complicated for Mia in initially promising, but ultimately unsettling
ways with the appearance of her mother’s new boyfriend, a hardware store
security card named Connor (Michael Fassbender). His sudden appearance
in her family is exciting at first, if not a bit disquieting.
At first, Connor seems like a positive beacon of change for both
Mia and her mother: he is handsome, kind of devilishly charming, and has a
childlike whimsy and freewheeling spirit about him.
Outwardly, Connor comes off as a suitable paternal figure for Mia’s unraveling
family circle, and the film sort of relishes in showing him off as a calm,
respectable, and well mannered authority and surrogate father/husband
figure that just may be the answer for Mia and her mother.
Unfortunately, a subtle, but obvious, sexual tension begins to form
between Mia and Connor. Mia witnesses him at his most intimate with her mother, which
makes her deliriously jealous, but the more she attempts to open herself
up to this stranger, the more Connor reciprocates similar feelings and
ventures to personal areas with the girl where he should definitely not go. The
character of Connor is one of the most fascinatingly complex characters in
a film in a long time. He is
also certain to polarize many a filmgoer: the simply criticism of him
would be to label him as an unlikable and amoral pedophile.
I don’t think that Arnold’s direction and Fassbender’s
intricately layered and resolute performance allows for such one-note denunciations. At first,
Connor is presented as the perfunctory working-class stiff with a heart of
gold figure to Mia and he certainly represents – at least at first – a
much more positive and nurturing parental figure than Mia’s mother.
After establishing Connor as the “good guy” Arnold and
Fassbender lift up the curtain on this man and sort of erode expectations
that viewers have for him. The
way Fassbender – a performer that, after films like HUNGER
and INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS,
reveals how he can display unimpeachable dexterity and range as a character actor –
shows a complex layer of depth to Connor helps to make him more than a
one-dimensional fiend. His
overall temperament strays back and forth between protective and abusive.
Mia wrongly associates Connor as a figure where sex with him equals
intimacy and understanding, and she certainly is not an innocent victim
when Connor does fornicate with her (she is not raped or physically abused
beyond her will, she is consenting).
At the same time, Connor sees this troubled youth and uses her
angst and naiveté to foster trust in him, which leads to him luring her in. He both legitimately cares for Mia, but he does exploit
her vulnerabilities, even when they both think that it is not occurring,
and Fassbender is deceptively electrifying, quietly unsettling, and wily in his decidedly dicey
role. Weaker performers would
have made Connor an instant figure of deplorable mistrust and hate, but
Fassbengder knows that Connor is much more multi-dimensional than that. Then
there is Katie Jarvis, who gives one of the most empowered, heartfelt, honest and
powerful first performances of the movies.
Incredibly, Jarvis had no acting experience at all before landing
the role: legend has it that Arnold’s casting assistant saw her arguing
with her boyfriend in a Tilbury Town railway station and clearly saw potential in her to channel her real world anger into the sullen cauldron
of misery that exists within Mia. I
think that it is Jarvis’ own inherent greenhorn status as a performer
that allows for her acting in FISH TANK to breathe with so much more
legitimacy.
Jarvis is
allowed to just inhabit and become the role without the constraints of
letting years of habits and distracting method techniques get
in the way, and it is also a testament to Arnold’s keen understanding of
her character that allows for this eerie transformation.
The people in FISH TANK don’t exist like movie characters that
are desperately trying to conform to the trite conventions of a script;
instead, they act, talk, and interact like real people, and with Jarvis’
tour de force portrayal of a her rancorously distressed teen, the film
feels even more emotionally raw and tangible as a result.
Even though Jarvis plays a wholeheartedly hateful little cretin in the
film (she engages in a sickening plot near the conclusion on the film with
a little girl that is very difficult to watch), it’s impossible to take your eyes off of Jarvis: she is
just a
natural and magnetic screen presence. The
environment is also an important character in the film, which is
presented by Arnold as sparsely evocative.
Filmed entirely in one of the worst and seediest parts of Essex
county (to the initiated, one of London’s darker suburbs), Arnold
creates an overwhelmingly provocative and fully realized sense of both
economic depression and unavoidable social oppression.
The drab, dirty, and claustrophobic aura of Mia’s flat and
surrounding neighborhood only further embellishes her sense of desolation
and hopelessness. Arnold’s
cinéma vérité style – using hand held shots, long takes, and a
conservative usage of cuts and edits - allows us to linger on the
malevolent details of Mia’s world.
The film grounds you in its repressive universe with such a soul-crushing
immediacy. Arnold,
to her credit, is not engaging in poverty porn here: she’s simply a ruthlessly honest
documenter of it.
Even when there are odd and surreal moments – like one recurring
early image of a white horse chained to the ground in a vacant lot, a
symbol of hope – you just know that the urban decay framing it and the
characters will be too much to overcome. FISH TANK reminded me of two great films from last year: PRECIOUS (another drama about an inner city teen with an abusive and unsympathetic mother that tries to free herself) and AN EDUCATION (another drama about a young, impressionable woman trying to discover who she is while engaging in an inappropriate sexual liaison with a man twice her age). Yet, in both of those films – despite even PRECIOUS’ far-reaching urban nihilism and personal despair – there was a sense of hope for the future for their confused, isolated and self-doubting teens. There is none of that in FISH TANK: Mia leaves the film just as she entered it, and even though she escapes from it in the literal sense in the end, there is no suggestion that her life will improve for the better. Many viewers may cry a resounding foul, perhaps expecting a tidier and more upbeat denouement for the character. Arnold, however, has no desire to conciliate apathetic filmgoers that have gorged on diets of annoyingly condescending and manufactured feel good entertainments. She does not filter or censor Mia’s plight or story. She shows it for what it actually is, and that’s why few films this year (or any past year for that matter) have the painful and unmistakable realism of FISH TANK. |
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