Thursday, December 27, 2007
I Was A Preteen Skinhead
If you are watching cable and see that "This is England" is going to come on next, do yourself a favor and watch the credits. It consists of a montage of early 1983 England edited marvelously to Toots and Mayall's burning track "54-46 is my Number." Margaret Thatcher, Frogger, Rubik's Cube, Aerobics, BMX biking, CD pressing, Falklands and street riots. Wow! I was ready for a richly detailed film experience of a crazy and complex time.
And the first half or so is really solid. Shaun, a twelve year old who recently lost his father in the Falklands conflict is having a tough time growing up. His mother is kind of a television zombie with a big hair eighties perm. Kids are hassling him right and left. He can't even get a few minutes of solace with a comic book in a corner shop. So he ends up with some quasi-skinhead types who are really more a collection of disenfranchised youth. There is a Goth chick named Smell and a Jamaican named Milk, a heavy set kid call Gadget who takes a load of crap from everyone and Woody, the group's leader and keeps an eye out for young Shaun, giving him a sense of belonging and place. Alcohol and drug abuse, air rifles, and vandalism in funny clothes are about the extreme of it all for this group, until Banjo and Combo, come into the group's dynamic. This is when "This is England" moves from document and observer of the times into an overly earnest affair with a very obnoxious piano swell soundtrack to let the audience know there is an important moment in the film underway.
Combo was the alpha dog of the group before he went to prison. Shaun, who joins Combo who leads instead of Woody in hate crimes, National Front activities, and racist graffiti when the spit line is drawn, is there because Combo is able to play to his sense of anger about the uselessness of his father's death towards the Thatcher agenda in the Falklands. He can't win back Lol, a one night stand prior to prison, who is now Woody's girlfriend and this puts him into a kind of psychotic tail spin again with plunky piano music overloading a particularly vicious scene.
Thomas Turgoose is one of those really natural performances you don't forget by young actors and Joseph Gilgun is good as the charismatic Woody. But ultimately this is another case of an independent film that hammers you over the head with its message and uses fucked up violence and ugliness as a kind of climax that masks the fact there isn't enough solid matter in the structure of the film to begin with...but if you get a chance to stumble into the film's credit sequence and first third, you'll find it worth checking out.
posted by well-executed buffet at 3:58 PM
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