Chapter Two:
Red Riding 1980
By Brett Beach
February 17, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
I can’t necessarily chalk it up to the randomness of the universe, but a fair number of my recent rentals from the library have dealt in more than just passing detail with the death of a child. Being a parent hasn’t necessarily made me more susceptible to the sway of such a dramatic device — I think at this moment of a college friend who was also a cinephiliac and noted quite accurately while we were at school “It’s easy to get me to cry. Kill a kid or a dog, tears are easily jerked” — but it has raised my level of empathy for fictional families who lose one of their members.
I watched Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 mood piece Don’t Look Now for only the second time and feel that it is a rare film that succeeds completely at establishing an emotional (versus logical) stranglehold over its audience. It begins with a sense of disquiet in an otherwise idyllic scene and never releases the audience from that foreboding air. Dealing with the aftermath of the drowning of a young girl, the film shows how that incident becomes a crack in an otherwise strong marriage. Mixing dream fever logic, second sight, and an accumulating sense of wholly enveloping dread, Don’t Look Now make a strong argument through working through the pain of such a loss, and for never, ever, ever, walking the streets of Venice alone at night.
Though I have no doubt that I must have been aware of Grave of the Fireflies at several points throughout the '90s and beyond (another college friend swears he mentioned it on numerous occasions and I have no reason to doubt him), it wasn’t until I came across Roger Ebert’s Great Movies review of it three years ago, that I took note of it. Based on his criticism and the comments readers logged in response, I knew that I would want to see it, and that I would have to be in the right frame of mind for a story of such unbearable sadness. I am happy (?) to say that it wasn’t as annihilatingly sad as I feared, but only because I had misinformed myself on one of the plot points.
Isao Takahata’s 1988 animated drama, an adaptation of Akiyuki Nosaka’s memoir, is a quietly devastating tale of Setsuko and Seita, a brother and sister left to fend for themselves in rural Japan during the closing days of World War II, as Allied fire bombings have killed their mother and their soldier father remains away at sea. First rooming with an aunt who views them as a nuisance, they eventually take to living in a nearby fallout shelter, bartering, scrounging, and even stealing to secure an ever dwindling food supply.
The central irony of Grave of the Fireflies is how their hope, their spirits and eventually their bodies (the sister succumbs to malnutrition) are broken down, in the middle of a gorgeous pastoral landscape that would be a child’s summertime play world under ordinary circumstances. It’s a narrative of utter simplicity sketched in stark terms (and at 89 minutes, it bears the intimacy of a short story or novella rather than an epic sprawl) and its thorough success as a film — not simply anime — is in its deft avoidance of sentimentalizing the subject matter, not an easy thing to do when the slow wasting away of a young girl is one of your key themes. Nosaka’s story was also recently adapted into a live action film, but animation strikes me as the most appropriate (perhaps the only appropriate) medium for this tale. The edges seem sharper, the colors seem brighter, and yes, the mounting desperation feels more palpable than it would with “real actors”.
I chose this week’s column with Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium Trilogy” films fresh in my mind. I figured another recent adaptation of a crime fiction series to the big screen would be appropriate, as well as giving me even more novels to eventually work my way around to reading. I opted for one of the most celebrated set of films in recent years, a trio of 2009 productions that, like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, et al. made their way to the States in 2010.
The Red Riding series, British novelist David Peace’s quartet of fiction books about a decades-long murder investigation and its dovetailing with unfathomable police corruption in Yorkshire, England came out around the start of last decade and was directly inspired by actual crimes (and cover-ups) in the area. Each book focuses on a different year (1974, 1977, 1980, 1983) and different leading protagonists — a newspaper reporter, a detective, a lawyer — while secondary characters often carry on through, popping up again when least expected, sometimes simply in the background, and sometimes with information or actions that fundamentally alter the story.
Three of the four books were made into films for British television, adapted by the same screenwriter, but helmed by three different directors. (’77 was left out, for purely economic reasons, but a full screenplay exists and the film may yet be made somewhere down the line.) The first film was directed by Julian Jarrold (Kinky Boots, Brideshead Revisited), the second by James Marsh (Man on Wire, The King), and the final installment by Anand Tucker (Shopgirl, Leap Year). Each was also shot on a different film format — 16mm for 1974, 35mm for 1980 and digital for 1983. The films are meant to be standalone and could be watched in that light, but as my discussion below shows, I think that would rob them of what little effective power is gained from watching all three cumulatively over a short period of time.
I do want to focus more specifically on 1980, rather than a comparison of all three as I am more often wont to do, for the strengths and the faults of the series are in it as much as the other two films. However, a few dry facts and observations to set the stage first. The combined running time of the films is just a few minutes past five hours. Each film does a remarkable job of evoking its time period through costume and production design rather than relying on period tunes or references to do the heavy lifting. The accents are quite thick in spots and some dialogues are impenetrable (I watched on Netflix and not DVD and so did not have the option for captions) but more often than not the melody of each scene is hummable, even if some notes get lost in translation.
The key image of the entire series, for me, is the recurring shot of a row house at the end of a block, a steeply sloping hill to the right and behind it, a path winding its way up towards a stony wall at top. That house, its inhabitants, that hill, and what lies just over the other side of the wall all play crucial parts in the first and third films. In the first film, cinematographer Rob Hardy often shoots the dwelling so that it barely takes up a fifth of the screen on the left. It always seems visually on the verge of being cut off or even run out of frame by the adjacent hill. On some psychic level, I find it quite distressing.
In the 1980 installment, a stalled investigation into the disappearance of numerous young girls results in an outside policeman, Peter Hunter, being brought in and given a fair amount of free reign to create a task force to reexamine each of the cold cases and look for connections that may have been missed or evidence that was overlooked. He is an honest cop and moral on the job — both qualities in short supply in the Yorkshire police ranks as the film presents it — but troubled at home by a marriage strained by a wife whose constant worrying for his safety leaves him stressed and her prone to miscarriages. He is ultimately brought down by his willingness to step on toes and a weakness for a fellow cop with whom he once had a fling and for whom he still harbors feelings.
Paddy Considine, the father from In America and the short-lived reporter in The Bourne Ultimatum, is Hunter, and I think he gives one of the best performances in the trilogy. To sum up his physical appearance succinctly, he is like Stephen Rea but with the latter’s hangdog glumness and wryness switched out for a still youthful, possibly naïve hopefulness. Hunter once investigated a peculiar nightclub shootout in the area (which takes place at the climax of the 1974 installment) but had to cut short his investigation for personal reasons. He views the situation entrusted with him now as a chance to make amends for that. Unfortunately, he fails to grasp the enormity of the corruption of those both aiding and attempting to derail his investigation until it is far too late. His final scene plays like a police station flip on Joe Pesci’s “Oh fuc—“ moment in Goodfellas. Those two seconds accorded to you to consider how badly you misread the situation. Two seconds after which said misreading will fail to matter.
But what about the general weakness of 1980 (and the other two films by extension?) When L.A. Confidential came out in 1997, I was compelled to go back and read it and a fair number of James Ellroy’s works, including the three other novels in his L.A. Quartet and what would be the first novel in his Underworld USA trilogy, American Tabloid. Consuming those books in the space of about a month left me as paranoid, edgy, and consumed as many of Ellroy’s protagonists. Books have that effect on me. As deeply as a movie or song may become ingrained in my life, stories take up serious short-term residence in my psyche and free-basing volatile material such as Ellroy serves up, without cutting it with something a little less potent, drains me quickly.
I imagine that Peace’s novels may have the same effect, but the film adaptations do not. All the films feel too rushed to properly capture the air of all pervading institutionalized evil. We see horrific behavior on the part of the cops and we see them intentionally botching their own inquiries (for reasons that become more clear in the 1983 installment) but the cumulative effect winds up underwhelming, less than the sum of its parts. As an example, in 1980, the time between Hunter being brought on board and given carte blanche and being pulled from the investigation is barely over an hour. As viewers, we haven’t been present to nearly enough of the slog and grind and his steely determination for it to feel like he’s done enough to warrant such treatment.
My other complaint is that the cops are so vicious and so willing to take any measures to keep their ranks closed, that it seems unlikely that anyone who posed any kind of threat would be allowed to stay alive for more than 10 years (as one key supporting character is who shows up in all three films.) When it’s known that he knows something, what keeps the coppers from disappearing him? I will admit to occasionally getting lost in the morass of the plot, a fractured chronology (but not nearly so much as the novels apparently) and many mustached Brits all playing characters named John, but the central conceit that anyone would stay alive for any significant amount of time who posed even the smallest threat to these policemen seems more unbelievable as time goes on. This speaks, I guess, to how convincingly the level of corruption is captured by Tony Grisoni in his adaptations.
Marsh wasn’t an obvious choice for this series (in fact, all three directors were selected specifically to get them out of their comfort zones) and I think this installment is the least emotionally affecting of all three. I miss the poignancy he brought to his documentary Man on Wire, his ability to capture a larger than life figure and yet allow the everyman individual beneath to emerge.
To bring this back around to the idea of dead children, each installment of Red Riding has to walk that line between the gruesomeness of sordid murders as rendered in Peace’s novels and the limits of (British) television and audience members’ constitutions. The makers of the films erred on the side of the restraint and the result is a hunt for a murderer where the victims too often fade away from the foreground. Names are invoked over and over but to little effect and when the final film ends with an uncharacteristic ray of light (figuratively and literally), the lack of emotional pull is noticeable. It doesn’t feel earned and it doesn’t feel right. Tellingly, Grisoni added that bit to the resolution himself.
Next time: This column will self-destruct in seven seconds, probably with bullets and doves flying furiously in the background, if that’s possible.