Fathers, Sons, And Bogeymen

This  Is England

The New York Sun, July 25, 2007

Don't be put off by agitprop, achingly self-conscious blue-collar grit, and accents that may mystify some on this side of the Atlantic: "This Is England," the latest offering from the up-and-coming British director Shane Meadows, is a sometimes exhilarating, sometimes wrenching and, at its best, profoundly moving coming-of-age tale that also manages to find room to ponder questions of friendship, fatherhood, group loyalty, masculinity, and national identity. That's not bad for 98 minutes.

What's more, this is a film with a brilliantly evocative sense of time and place. "This Is England" offers the England of 1983, an era of great transition. As the origins of the movie's title (borrowed both from a classic World War II documentary and an even more melodramatic than usual offering from the Clash) suggest, it was a country on edge, and at the edge. The most difficult part of Margaret Thatcher's harsh, necessary cure was, we know now, over. Back then, however, it was by no means clear that the treatment would work, particularly in beaten-down provincial towns of the type where "This Is England" is set-- places that rapidly found themselves becoming post-industrial at a time when post-industrial was a euphemism for "nothing to do."

It is one of the ironies of history that, if there's one thing that came to symbolize Britain's brighter future, it was the Falklands War, a conflict rooted in Britain's imperial past, a conflict that Mr. Meadows has called "suspicious." Oh, whatever, Shane, whatever. The fact remains that victory in the South Atlantic was a reassuring reminder that there was life in the old lion. Still more important, it ensured Ms. Thatcher's re-election, something that Mr. Meadows probably still regrets. Get over it already, Shane: It's done.

It is one of the ironies of "This Is England" that triumph in those distant islands has brought only misery to the film's hero, 12-year-old Shaun (the remarkable Thomas Turgoose). Already something of a loner, Shaun has been left adrift by the death of his father in combat in the Falklands. Try as she might, his mother cannot fill the gap left by a much-missed dad, who survives only in vacation snaps and in one ramrod, khakiclad portrait, as Tommy Atkins, iconic and doomed.

After a bad day at the local Comprehensive (in his painfully-dated flares, he's ineligible for membership in any of the schoolyard's tribes), poor, battered Shaun is making his way home. Wearily, your poor, battered reviewer braced himself for the inevitable rain, concrete, and misery of almost any British film set in the depths of the Thatcher terror. What happens, instead, is that Shaun encounters a small band of skinheads-- lost boys (and girls) lurking, as lost boys (and girls) should, under the ground (well, in an underpass anyway). Before too long, the loner finds himself adopted into a tribe all his own.

Despite its daunting exterior, the tribe, genially presided over by the kindly and charismatic Woody (wonderfully played by Joe Gilgun), is benign. The time it spends together is purposefully aimless, purposefully companionable and just a bit daft. This reaches its peak in one oddball, joyful excursion that is transformed into something almost ecstatic by the bewitching ska rhythms of the film's skillfully compiled soundtrack. It concludes with the trashing of some empty municipal housing, but it's difficult to mind too much. As J.M. Barrie would have explained, lost boys can make for a rough crowd.

A rose-tinted spectacle? Yes. But one that is forgivable in such a nostalgic, openly autobiographical movie, particularly as, in contrast to what comes next, it serves an obvious dramatic (and too obviously didactic) purpose. Every Eden must have its serpent, every lagoon its Captain Hook. Sure enough, Shaun's skinhead idyll is soured by the arrival of Combo (a subtle, horrifying and ultimately heart-breaking Stephen Graham). A "first generation" skinhead now in his 30s, Combo is fresh from prison and ready to reassert his authority. He's a malign, thuggish Falstaff to Woody's gentle Prince Hal. Too weak to stand up to him, too strong to go along, Woody quits the group, taking his girlfriend and a few others with him. It's a measure of Mr. Meadows's sensitivity as a filmmaker that we see that this is the last thing that Combo wants.

Woody may have departed, but Shaun remains. In effect he abandons the mentor who befriended him for the brute power of a man who is, significantly, about the same age as that father now lying in a military graveyard. Combo appears content to fall into some approximation of the paternal role, but he comes with an unlovely agenda. He's with the National Front, a racist, proto-fascist political party that defaced the British political landscape at the time. For a while it looks as if Shaun might prove an all-too-apt pupil.

In reality, the National Front was always more of a bogeyman to be brandished by the left than a serious electoral menace, and it's as a bogeyman that Mr. Meadows uses it in this movie. Taking his film solely as a period piece is, I suppose, fair enough; but if it's contemporary political resonance he's looking for, it falls flat, too dated to be persuasive: Those best described as "fascists" in modern Britain are more likely to be interested in fatwas than führers.

If Mr. Meadows's politics tend to the one-dimensional, his skills as a director (and writer -- the screenplay is his as well) are anything but. Combo is a vicious bully, but, it turns out, there's more to him than that. Deeply conflicted and flailing desperately in a world that has left him behind, he is no cartoon Brownshirt. How Shaun reacts to him is the central drama of this fascinating, complex film, and this is a drama that will not date, so long as there are fathers, sons, and the need for a tribe.