Critics worldwide have rightly acclaimed Paddy Considine’s
feature debut Tyrannosaur as one of
the best films of 2011. Considine's first feature presents a brutally honest portrayal
of a man lost in a spiral of violence, alcoholism and loneliness. It manages to provide a skilful illustration of the issues at hand while never indulging in a tone of bourgeois condescendence.
Tyrannosaur’s opening sequence has Joseph kick his dog with a brutality that only comes with
a lifelong experience of violence and humiliation. This life relates as a direct
result of an existence devoid of warmth, compassion and whatever other notion
makes life in the world at all bearable. The opening scene sets the tone of
the whole text and, in my screening, it also made the couple in front of me
leave with bowed heads, in a shameful admission of their unwillingness to ruin
their perfectly good Wednesday night with an hour and a half of raging
bleakness. Fair enough! Considine's Tyrannosaur is by no means an easy watch.
Considine's main protagonist Joseph is your quintessential
bully in a tracksuit, or so it would seem. After another night on, what he
calls, 'the rage', he finds refuge in a charity shop owned by Sophie, a devout
middle-class Christian. After Sophie offers Joseph a cuppa and a prayer,
the latter, convinced of her being but another middle-class do-gooder, verbally
lashes out at her, leaving her in tears. So far, so cliché, but Considine is
too sensible a film-maker to leave it at that.
Soon enough the audience realizes that Sophie herself is
imprisoned in an existence fuelled by rage, if, in her case, directed against
her. In an almost unbearable scene of extreme, because poignant, humiliation,
things spiral into unstoppable violence. The subtle and
quiet strands of hopeful undertones in the friendship of Sophie and Joseph
almost seem doomed from the start.
Rather than being mere symbolic representations of social
issues, Considine allows his characters space to divulge a rich complexity.
The tone and theme of the film, just as the characters themselves are build
upon the foundation of conceptual Christian duality, namely, the admission of sins past and redemption
sought. The characters are desperately looking for a means of communication to
bridge the gap between their loneliness and the surrounding world.
Disenfranchised, these figures on the fringes of society desperately seek not
only a voice, but a further justification or explanation for their actions which in
itself are nothing but the accumulation of respective existential
circumstances. In Joseph's case, this takes the form of destruction through
rage. Unable to build, Joseph's only
means of control is destruction. At the same time, however, Joseph is very much
aware of the cruelty of his actions and capable of feeling the accompanying
guilt. As such, Considine brilliantly portrays this extreme inner complex in
the bar scene in which Joseph, seated in front of a pint in a lonely corner,
almost goes out of his mind, muttering to himself, unable to give proper
expression to the emotions that tear him apart. Again, Joseph turns to the only
means of emotive execution he knows: violence.
Joseph is the man to make malevolent japes at his wife,
while the cruel awareness of his own actions tears him apart.
Hanna, on the other hand, attempts to give meaning to her
inhumane surroundings through, not so much her faith, but the rhetoric of the
Christian dogma. She uses the Christian values of forgiveness almost in an endeavor
to justify her martyrdom; most noticeably through the status of abused wife. She turns to Joseph in
the certainty that he needs to be saved, until she finds herself in need of
saving. Salvation, here, being somewhat a too blunt description for the
relationship that is formed between the two protagonists. Considine never
forces the topic, he lets it unfold in its own right, never feeling the
directorial need to clarify the subtlety of character-motive. As such, the
audience never feels certain as to the authenticity of Hanna's belief, which,
in the end, is of little consequence. Joseph and Hanna's alliance is not so
much one of love, a one of attempted redemption, shared loneliness and communal
forgiveness for sins committed past and present.
As expected, the performances are nothing short of
brilliant. Peter Mullan is superb in portraying Joseph with an underlying,
omni-present rage that almost takes the physical form of a restrained twitch.
The only slight discrepancy lies in his somewhat rugged, nevertheless quite
healthy-looking physique, as his skin color lacks the greyish tone of a long-term
alcoholic.
Coleman, of course, proves to be the revelation of the film.
Known mostly for her performance in Peepshow
and The Green Wing, Coleman couldn't
have found a better role to break the typecast of a slightly ditsy, chaotic,
but nevertheless lovable girl next door. She plays Hanna with a heart-breaking
fragility that never descends into the saccharine. It is her smile that holds
the most power over the spectator, as it is as innocent as it is melancholic.
She is seen gulping vodka in tears in the kitchen of her charity shop, only to
break into that dejected, sweet smile of hers once a customer enters.
It is the
poignant smallness of moments like these that make the film immensely powerful.
Scenes of this cinematic quality tap into the full tapestry of the characters' inner
life, without having to resolve to overly grand cinematic gestures. The depiction of a broken man who, while having initiated the death of his dog, nevertheless
stays by his side, while the latter dies. The extreme humiliation of
a woman urinated upon by her husband while being asleep. The destruction of a
cuddly toy by a dog initiating the collapse of a childhood. Considine manages
to let these moments manifest within the text without ever resolving to pathos.
I have very much a mind to send a copy of the DVD to Clint Eastwood.
