Method in madness: Musings on Brit films

I was watching Gary Oldman's Nil by Mouth (1997) the other night. The film explores the travails of a dysfunctional South East London family headed by an alcoholic malcontent who doesn't even scruple to beat his pregnant wife up in a fit of rage. In the film, Ray Winstone plays a foul-mouthed, beer-bellied wife-beater while Kathy Burke is at her "unglamorous" best.

Oldman's directorial debut exemplifies a striking feature of contemporary British films – namely, their ability to move the audience by the sheer power of character-driven stories. This is true not only of the very successful Tarantinoesque joyride Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), but also of Sexy Beast (2000), Gangster No. 1 (2000), Football Factory (2004), Layer Cake (2004) and The Business (2005). And like the devastatingly realistic Nil by Mouth, all these films are rooted in realisms of their own, and are "stylish" in terms of dialogue and execution.

To lend authenticity to his film's East End setting, Guy Ritchie roped in ex-cons and burly footballers to play pals and foes in Lock, Stock. Gary Oldman doesn't make an appearance in Nil by Mouth, but ironically dedicates the film to his own abusive father. In fact, he took a break from acting, and wrote and directed the whole film which he based on his own childhood days in a seedy South East London neighbourhood. Nick Love's Football Factory, a film about soccer hooliganism, has a real-life football enthusiast in the lead. Matthew Vaughan, the guy who produced Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Snatch, makes Daniel Craig play a nameless drug distributor in Layer Cake. In Jonathan Glazer's Sexy Beast, a cool gangster flick set in Spain, Ray Winstone is pitted against Ben Kingsley. Director Paul McGuigan delves into the primitive mind of a remorseless criminal in Gangster No. 1, a film partly based on the life of "Mad" Frankie Fraser. In Nick Love's The Business that has its setting in Spain's Costa Del Sol, Danny Dyer teams up with Tamer Hassan to deliver a roguish tale of crime, friendship and deception.

Violence is part of British life, and British actors love playing gangsters just as American actors love playing cowboys. Football matches and local derbies are the most common occasions for rolling up one's sleeves, and the new-wave directors emerging in the late '90s started making films on the violence that characterises British life. In Nil by Mouth, the tension between Ray (Winstone) and Valerie (Kathy Burke) erupts into domestic violence, with the drunken husband abusing and savagely kicking the defenceless wife in the stomach. Violence in Lock, Stock is manifested in the threats ("Hatchet" Harry threatens the quartet of friends to chop off their fingers if they fail to pay him £500,000 in one week) and the extended scenes of gunfights as well as in the non-stop torrent of swearing that pervades the dialogues from start to finish. In fact, swearing is the common parlance in all these films as the actors make liberal use of the "F"-word in each appearance, even in front of children: in Nil by Mouth, Ray and his friend Mark do not spare the 7-year-old Michelle their beer-induced logorrhoea punctuated by cuss words; Jeremy Thomas, producer of Sexy Beast, admits that the film has 300 uses of the "C"-word, and 400 of the "F"-word. Gangster No. 1, Layer Cake and The Business each have their uncensored episodes of cussing.

But this is not to say that swearing in these films is gratuitous. Cuss words lend an earthiness to the language, a kind of realism to the story, a story of people spending a lot of time on the dark, narrow alleys of London. Lock, Stock takes this to the extreme, featuring a scene in subtitled cockney rhyming slang.

If puritans still take issue over the swearing part, there's another aspect that makes these films a pleasure to watch – their dialogues. The scripts provide sufficient scope for witticism as evident in the clever repartees by the characters. "The entire British Empire was built on cups of tea, and if you think I'm going to war without one, mate, you're mistaken," says Eddie in Lock, Stock. On another occasion, Soap says, "A minute ago this was the safest job in the world. Now, it's turning into a bad day in Bosnia." Danny Dyer's character has all the funny lines in The Business: "My old man wrote me a letter from prison once. It said if you don't want to end up in here, stay away from crime, women and drugs. Trouble is, that don't leave you much else to do, does it?" and then again, "The geezer was so hard even his nightmares were scared of him." In his introductory monologue, Daniel Craig's xxxx says in Layer Cake, that he's "not a gangster, just a businessman" and that his "commodity happens to be cocaine."

Critics have hailed Lock, Stock as the British Pulp Fiction, placing Ritchie in the front ranks of contemporary British filmmakers. The film made Jason Statham an international star and Ritchie, an instant Hollywood favourite. Ben Kingsley's performance as a swear-machine-cum-grumpy-gangster Don Logan in Sexy Beast earned him accolades from both sides of the Atlantic – he conceded his Best Supporting Actor Oscar to Jim Broadbent for the latter's performance in Iris. Kathy Burke won the Best Actress honour at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival while Oldman also bagged a number of awards for his independent directorial debut. Indeed, Nil by Mouth's extraordinarily powerful cast coupled with Oldman's flawless directing shows why indie films from the UK are sometimes so much better than their big-banner, star-studded American counterparts.


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