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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Lynne Ramsay's impressive, frustrating debut feature knocked out the U.K., but her scabby view of poverty betrays more technique than feeling.
Oct 24, 2000 | The great movies about people caught in poverty -- Vittorio De Sica's "Shoeshine," "The Bicycle Thief" and "Umberto D" and Satyajit Ray's "The Apu Trilogy" -- all work to erase the barriers between the audience and the people on-screen. Or else, as in the case of Luis Buñuel's "Los Olvidados," they possess a caustic, raging passion equal to the emotional and physical brutality of their subject.
Scottish writer-director Lynne Ramsay's "Ratcatcher," an impressive and frustrating debut feature just opening in the United States but already widely celebrated in the U.K., keeps us at a determined distance. Set in and around a Glasgow, Scotland, housing project in the early '70s, "Ratcatcher" follows James (William Fadie), a watchful, largely silent boy of about 12 who may or may not be responsible (Ramsay is ambiguous) for the drowning of a younger boy in a garbage-strewn canal behind the projects.
The larger subject of "Ratcatcher" is stunted lives. James' family -- his parents and two sisters, one older, one younger than he -- dreams of getting a new council house in what for them amounts to the suburbs, but the almost sheepish way they inquire about the status of their application suggests that none of them expect their lot to improve. With the exception of the periodic appearances of a gang of adolescent toughs, whose presence always heralds bad news, there is none of the overt brutality that has become a depressing staple of films about the lower classes (Gary Oldman's punishing "Nil by Mouth," for example).
The characters in "Ratcatcher" seem too knocked out by the mere challenge of getting through the day to inflict their frustrations on one another. James' unemployed dad (Tommy Flanagan), whose face bears the slashing scar of God knows what previous altercation, drinks himself into a miserable stupor, while his mom (Mandy Matthews, who manages sparks of affection and humor) maintains something approaching a normal routine. The film is set during a garbage strike, and the stinking mounds of green plastic trash bags dotting the landscape are a (rather obvious) metaphor for the emotional pestilence breeding among the inhabitants of this no-hope slum.
Ratcatcher
Written and directed by Lynne Ramsay
Starring William Fadie, Mandy Matthews, Tommy Flanagan, Leanne Mullen
There's no denying Ramsay's compassion -- particularly toward her protagonist, young James -- but it's an arm's-length compassion. I'd like to believe that Ramsay is trying to avoid the unintentional humanitarian condescension that often mars movie views of the poor. I think she assumes, rightly, that the deprivation and hopelessness of her characters are not something many in her potential audience have encountered, and she appears loath to believe that sympathy alone is enough to bring us close to characters who have been so battered by circumstance and their own limitations.
The trouble is, she doesn't do anything to bring her characters close to us. She's right to be suspicious of sociological bromides that presume to explain the mysteries of personality, but for all we learn about these characters they have never been otherwise and will ever be thus. James' dad is a recognizable sort, a drunk in his 30s whose days seem a rehearsal for the broken-toothed, sunken-chested wreck he'll become in middle age. But like too many of the other people we encounter here, he's more a type than an individual -- a member of the inarticulate, intransigent poor.
A large part of the movie's problem is that both the characters and the actors who portray them serve as vehicles for Ramsay's stylistic flourishes. She doesn't have the usual coldness of filmmakers who reduce people to figures in their aesthetic blueprints, but since she hasn't found a way inside them they feel reduced nonetheless. Ramsay works in a style that might be called introverted expressionism; everything is muted, cooled out, tamped down. It's a film that seems entirely composed of bleak landscapes, static shots of faces with slugged-out expressions, a nearly fetishistic attention to grime and scabs and general decay.
