Filth
(2013)
(SPOILERS) The unqualified success of Trainspotting foisted upon Irvin Welsh a certain cinematic cachet, but not of the positive variety. Any subsequent attempts to adapt his novels appeared to confirm that Danny Boyle’s sophomore zeitgeist-seizing movie was the exception that proved the rule. Welsh’s work was just too difficult, unruly and controversy baiting to translate to the silver screen with any degree of coherence and fetid lustre intact. That is, until Filth came along. Generally regarded as one of his least filmable novels (which is saying something), it arrived to generally favourable reviews if not massive audience response. It’s telling, though, that the glue holding the picture together is not any sense of nascent auteurism on the part of writer/director John S Baird. Rather it’s the central performance of James McAvoy, who lends his loathsome misanthrope sufficient charm and tortured soul that we’re willing to stick with him.
The great achievement of Boyle and screenplay writer John
Hodge with Trainspotting was not only
in making the unpalatable palatable (and doing so without diminishing the
impact of its least viewer-friendly elements) but in foresting a coherent
narrative on a fragmented and episodic novel. Trainspotting remains highly episodic as a movie, but Boyle fuses
the disparate elements together through a combination of tone, music and
(all-importantly) narration. Whether consciously or otherwise, Baird repeats at
least two of these devices. In Clint Mansell he has a master-musician attending
to the soundtrack, and as a result the tonal shifts (and the main theme for
Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson – McAvoy) are aurally attuned. So too,
Robertson’s conversational voice over has the casually informative tone that
invites acceptance of whatever horrendous misdeed he is about to perpetrate
next (it should probably have been a clue that there is only one other voice
over in the movie but, while I was halfway there, I didn’t put it all
together). Where Baird slips up is that he doesn’t quite nail the tone, at
least until it’s too late.
Trainspotting’s
apparently random incidents fused together thanks to Renton’s overriding perspective,
and his reflection included pathos amid the caustic recollections. Baird is
unable to bridge his empathic gap with sufficient sureness. Perhaps part of
this is down to the autobiographical nature of Welsh’s heroin novel; Filth feels like an invention,
transferring the addict protagonist to a classic genre setting (the crime
novel) and giving him some classic demons to battle (his family has left him,
he has a dark secret in his past). It might be the intention to gleefully smear
faeces over detective conventions, and in part this works well, but we’ve seen
bad guy cops at work many times before, often extremely humorously. As a result
any shock value is essentially limited. What Baird needs desperately is for Filth to flow, and unfortunately
McAvoy’s narrative confidentiality can’t paper over the cracks in his
director’s technique. What’s frustrating about Filth is that it’s so close to achieving what it aims for, but in
the end the distance it fails to cover is crucial.
Bruce introduces us to a motley assortment of fellow
officers, all of whom may have an interest in an inspector position up for
grabs; the increasingly ubiquitous Imogen Poots as a career minded female
officer whom Robertson sees as shagging her way to the top (it couldn’t just be
that she’s good at her job; she’s a woman), the almost as ever-present Jamie
Bell (something of a protégée with a coke habit and a small winky),
metro-sexual Emun Elliott (whose sexuality Bruce casts aspersions on at every
opportunity), Gary Lewis’ dense old duffer and Brian McCardle’s fists-first
fascist whose wife (Kate Dickie) Bruce is seeing. Bruce introduces each with a
relentlessly malignant summary and inveigles us in his mission to undermine
each in turn, so as to increase his chances of securing promotion.
Then there's the main object of Bruce’s dyspeptic bullying; poor
Clifford Blades (Eddie Marsan, so meek and mild it makes his performance in The World’s End looks aggressive).
Bruce, in spite or perhaps because of repeatedly emphasised erectile
dysfunction, is attending to any woman who crosses his path by foul means or
fouler. So he harasses Clifford’s wife Bunty with a series of prank calls
posing as Frank Sidebottom (the scenes of Bruce watching Frank’s TV show are an
instance where Baird achieves a kind of nightmarish grandeur, although nothing
here comes close to the trippy visuals in Boyle’s Welsh adaptation).
Also
notable from the Clifford subplot (and those with Bruce’s boss, played by John
Sessions) is Filth’s disenchanted
depiction of freemasonry. I’m trying to think of films that have had much to
say on the subject (perhaps no one wants to offend, as you never know when you
might get on the wrong side of a financier?) The best I can come up with is The Man Who Would Be King, which takes a
most definitely benign view of the organisation. Here, the epithet “brother” is intended to suggest nothing
of the sort and, as many conceive of those who join a lodge, Bruce is only a
member so he can get ahead. The cruelties Bruce inflicts on Clifford are so
irredeemable, it’s only his final admission that the the latter is Bruce’s only
friend that goes some way to diffuse his behaviour.
During all of this we are witness to his increasing
affliction with substance abuse, as Bruce spirals out of the control he is
attempting to grasp. Baird never quite gets a handle on how to integrate this.
We see Bruce’s hallucinations of those he knows in totemic animal form, but
rendered as run-of-the-mill prosthetic appliances. The tapeworm gnawing away at
his insides is visualised so clumsily it would have been best to excise it all
together; Jim Broadbent’s doctor becomes his nagging inner voice in hectoring
and ill-judged dream sequences. Then there’s David Soul’s singing taxi driver;
a nice idea, but the execution just makes it seem random. Baird clearly has
more than enough ideas, but probably needed a collaborator to help him refine
them.
The director also has abundant energy, but he is too
scattershot too frequently. Ironically, it is only during the last 20 minutes
that he becomes more focused. Ironically, as this section is much straighter
than the preceding episodes. The narratively rather tidy and far-fetched
solution to the missing murder witness is revealed as Bruce himself; he has
been indulging in a spot of transvestism, assuming the identity of the wife who
has left him. It was in this state of apparel that he came across the gang
attacking a Japanese student in the opening scene. This has the over-the-top
quality of Michael Caine in Dressed to
Kill, but the ever-reliable McAvoy manages to sell it (although changing
the race of the murder victim, and the perpetrator, from the novel appears to
be a calculated decision to make Bruce slightly less odious; even not having
read it, I was expecting to find that Bruce
- or his Lady Macbeth wife – had some yet to be revealed conspiratorial
involvement in perpetrating the deed). Bruce facing up to his inner torment
requires Baird to veer away from attention grabbing vignettes. As a result some
of the wittiest scenes in the movie emerge; Bell’s now promoted inspector
telling the shrivelled Bruce how it is, and the final magnificent bad-taste
twist as the grieving Mary (Joanne Froggatt) calls round just as he is about to
hang himself. His convivial “Same rules
apply” is just the sureness of tone Baird needed throughout.
Despite the issues with the telling, what works works very
well. Bruce’s vile bile is frequently very funny, and his asides or looks to
camera are just the kind of approach that works for this larger-than-life kind
of material. The dry self-mockery that informs the opening address (“It is great being Scottish. We’re such a
uniquely successful race”), followed by Bruce stealing a child’s balloon,
sets the scene more assuredly than what follows. Even if elements contribute
nothing, they are often amusing; Session’s boss is obsessed with selling a
Hollywood screenplay, and we see him reading a copy of The Writer’s Guide at one point. No doubt Baird consulted it to
stress some of the less daring aspects of Filth.
For all that it wants to be provocative, it actually isn’t very. Sessions also
gets one of the best lines (“Not only is
there a latent Nazi racist homophobe but a bloody Jessie Boy after the
inspector’s job”). Apparently
Sessions walked out of the premier, as it wasn’t his cup of tea. Presumably he
did that actor’s thing of only reading his scenes before taking the part.
Filth’s a worthy
try, then. McAvoy is superb (and the supporting players are all note-perfect).
He delivers every self-destructive, vindictive and comic episode with gusto,
well aware that roles like this don’t come along every day. He’s better than
the movie, unfortunately. One only has to look at the advertising campaign to
see how uncertain everyone seems to have been about what this was (Bruce,
dressed in policeman’s uniform, riding variously a pig and a whisky bottle). It
looks desperate, frankly, and entirely clueless over how to get unconvinced
potential audiences to attend. The film itself is considerably better than
that, but may be a lesson in the need to wring changes further than Baird was prepared
to; perhaps if he had he still wouldn’t have made the next Trainspotting but a picture trying less hard to satisfy too many
parties. One thing about it, it’s an even less Chrissmassy Christmas movie than
Bad Santa.
***1/2