'Tyrannosaur'

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.