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High incident >> Oldman's Nil By Mouth keeps you flinching by JOANNE LATIMER
It's an awfully good film--awfully brutal, sad, frightening and honest. The story is about a married couple, Ray (Ray Winstone) and Val (Kathy Burke). Work is scarce and bleak futures are a certainty. "I'm 30 today, and I feel so fuckin' old," Val says, with every day showing on her face. Ray, an aging hooligan, would rather be drugging and driving around with best mate Marc (Jamie Foreman) than making a home with Val, their daughter Michele, Val's brother Billy (Charlie Creed-Miles) and Val's mother. Anyone in Ray's orbit is in danger of a beating. Val's main preoccupation is trying to predict his outbursts--then ducking. The plot gets more interesting once Oldman has shown us some of Ray's charm and the scope of Val's optionless life. "Just leave the bastard," isn't useful advice when there's nowhere safe to go. It's easy to show us a terrorized family and Oldman knows that. So what he offers is a full community study of cyclical domestic violence--the collusion, delusion and loyalty that lets everyone forgive and forget. Once Were Warriors did the same thing just as well. Ray is the English counterpart to Warriors' Jake. And English he is. The dialogue is a delight. The coarse slang that runs through the film, once decoded, is almost artful in its colour; Oldman's ear is right on pitch and he hasn't made any obvious attempts to Americanize the usage. Oldman doesn't appear in his own film. This is just as well, because Ray Winstone doesn't leave any space for him. Winstone is a terrifying brute onscreen, and all of Oldman's attentions were needed behind the camera to frame the horror. Burke, as Val, holds the film together, acting like true north for Ray's outbursts. She runs, he follows. The most terrifying scene, however, doesn't contain a savage beating; it's a reconciliation. Oldman, known as a recently reformed hedonist off screen (going public about his alcoholism), has delivered a focused, devastating film about the neighbourhoods that make up the memories of his childhood. He dedicated the film to his father at Cannes and claimed that Nil By Mouth was "based in autobiography." Yikes! It's a rough film, but worth every kick in the stomach. Opens this Friday, March 27 at the Cinéma du Parc. See repertory listings for showtimes
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Actor Gary Oldman must have been bored, hamming it up in pulpy crime dramas playing psychotic purveyors of violence. So he wrote and directed a film. It's called Nil By Mouth and it takes us careening through a theme park of violence, unemployment, drugs and grief in South London.