 |
|
|
|
Nil By Mouth (1997)
 email this review to a friend
Movie Review by Jarrod
June 22nd, 2008
|  |
'Nil by Mouth' is Gary Oldman's impressive debut as a director, and it must be partly biographic in its depiction of a family in the rough neighborhood of South London, where Oldman was born and raised. This district of the English capital is rife with drugs, crime, and prostitution. It is a blistering and ferocious domestic drama, and has a scene of spousal abuse that is every bit as gruesome and upsetting as what Lee Tamahori offered in Once Were Warriors, a film that is remarkably similar to this one.
Oldman approaches the material in much the same raw, hard-hitting manner Tamahori did; all that is different is the ethnicity of the characters. These are not wealthy people; they are like the folks one expects to see in a Mike Leigh movie, mostly working-class, with a compulsion to spend most of their money on booze. This is especially true of Ray (Ray Winstone), a monstrous brute who verbally and physically assaults his pregnant wife Val (Kathy Burke), with whom he already has a daughter. He is chronically suspicious of her, and wants to control every aspect of her life, something her mother Janet (Laila Morse) strongly disapproves of. Janet has a son named Billy (Charlie Creed-Miles), a hopeless junkie who frequently wanders the streets and is willing to steal to get the funds he needs to feed his addiction. Billy never stays away from home for too long, and Janet is never that harsh with him, never throws him out, even against her better judgment. She financially supports his habit from time to time, giving him money whenever he asks for it, knowing exactly what it will used for. On one occasion, she even drives him to the place where he meets his dealer. Ray drinks a lot, and is often in the company of his friend Mark (Jamie Forman). Mark is devoutly loyal to Ray, defends him, thinks every choice he makes is the right one. The two of them are small-time gangsters, and while it is never clear what they do, one can intuit that they are involved in just about everything that goes on in South London, especially the drug trade. Ray finds Val playing pool with a man at a local pub, and believes she is cheating on him, and this leads to a confrontation that leaves Val so savagely beaten that she has a miscarriage, and renders her practically unrecognizable with the bruises and swelling on her face. She tells Janet that she got hit by a car, and why Janet seems to accept this explanation is mysterious; Val later tells her the truth and goes to the hospital, even if Ray threatened to kill her. Ray then spends the rest of the film in a state of apparent remorse; he wants to apologize to Val and encourage her to come back home, but we doubt his sincerity, and so does she. Whatever Ray's faults, he does seem to love his daughter genuinely; he is never mean to her, and in fact expresses a desire to shield her from his angry, violent outbursts. He obviously has problems with self-control and alcohol, but this is no excuse for his vile behavior. This is an amazing Ray Winstone performance, but he is surrounded by a supremely talented cast, of which Burke and Morse are the highlights.
The script (by Oldman) is filled with a record number of expletives, alternating between f*ck and c*nt. Even the subtitles do not pick up every use; f*ck can be heard in background chatter, as well as in the main sets of dialogue. The British slang is copious and confusing, not quite as much as it was in Sexy Beast, but still, to an American audience, it may difficult to understand everything that is said. The film is hard to watch at certain moments, but while I never felt sympathy for Ray, I did believe he had the capacity to change, and Winstone delivers a wonderful monologue about Ray's childhood and his relationship with his father and this is where Oldman likely decided to share of his own memories, which must have been quite unpleasant.
email this review to a friend
Comment on this Review:
Sorry, you must be a member to add comments to reviews.
Join or Login. |
 Subscribe to MatchFlick Movie Reviews through RSS
|
