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FILM COMMENT
September/October 2002
OVER THE EDGE, INTO THE ABYSS
PAUL GREENGRASS, HEIR APPARENT TO GRITTY BRITISH REALISM, RELIVES BLOODY SUNDAY AND OTHER BLEAK MOMENTS FROM HIS NATION'S RECENT PAST
by Graham Fuller
above: Bloody Sunday
Writer-director Paul Greengrass says he made a conscious decision a few years ago to refocus his career by embarking on charged, emotive polemical films. The resulting docudramas, The Murder of Stephen Lawrence (99) and the current Bloody Sunday, both produced by Mark Redhead and photographed by Ivan Strasburg, posit Greengrass as the most urgent voice to have emerged on the British realist scene since the late Alan Clarke.
Neither a Marxist intellectual humanist like Ken Loach nor a neo-Dickensian anthropologist like Mike Leigh, Greengrass is, for the moment, a maker of excoriating dramas of injustice with a burning liberal conscience. These are attributes that the 47-year-old Londoner is likely to jettison one day however, given his desire to make films in Hollywood about different subjects and in different styles. As mutable as his contemporary Michael Winterbottom, Greengrass appears to be an auteur without a fixed aesthetic allegiance ÷ or a specific social agenda beyond his belief that the role of the artist is to be on the side of the underdog. He began his career as a director, roving global hotspots for Granada Televisionās hard-hitting documentary series World in Action, on which he first worked with Ivan Strasburg. Resurrected (89), his first feature, is the harsh and bitter true story of a British soldier (David Thewlis) who, left behind in the Falklands after the war with Argentina, sorrowfully makes his way back to his barracks in England, where he is ostracized and savagely beaten by his ćmates.ä Reminiscent of Clarkeās 1970 TV film Sovereignās Company, it initiated Greengrassās long-standing critique of male peer pressure and of soldierly arrogance in particular. He contends that he is not particularly conscious of this theme, offering, ćIām just not very boys-y, I suppose.ä
His next few films, all factually based, were made for television: Open Fire (94), a tense police chase drama; The One That Got Away (96), told from the perspective of the sole surviving member of an eight-man covert sas mission to destroy Saddam Husseinās Scud missiles during the Gulf War; and The Fix (97), which tracks the Rakeās Progress of a cocky soccer star (Jason Isaacs) reluctantly drawn into a match-fixing syndicate by a couple of teammates ÷ peer pressure again ÷ and his pursuit by the sleazy but principled reporter (Steve Coogan) who eventually brings him down. Greengrass brought a jaunty, tabloid flavor to this visually assured piece, which is laced with noisy, bawdy Northern humor and has the authentic smell of the early Sixties. It is also a rueful examination of an era when English footballers were little more than indentured servants. ćI thought it had something to say about tabloid culture emerging and destroying the myth of heroism,ä says Greengrass, who also wrote the script, ćand I got interested in trying to make a well-constructed film in a reasonably sophisticated way.ä
He followed it with The Theory of Flight (98), about the evolving relationship between a misfit artist (Kenneth Branagh) and a woman (Helena Bonham-Carter) suffering from Lou Gehrigās disease who wants to lose her virginity before she dies. The attempt to make an upbeat, glossy film about the taboo combination of sex and disability doomed the project to failure. ćI hadnāt written the script and I couldnāt get it right,ä Greengrass admits, ćand when you hop on a train thatās already started to roll before all the pieces are in place, you have to try to fix it as you go. It didnāt work, and that had a profound effect on me. I hooked up with Mark Redhead and we said, ĪLetās make some big statements about racism in Britain and the Troubles, in an unvarnished way and with all the production values stripped out.āä
Their first film, The Murder of Stephen Lawrence, painstakingly reconstructed one of the most egregious miscarriages of justice in recent British history. On the night of April 22, 1993, Stephen Lawrence, a black schoolboy, was attacked by a gang of white youths and fatally stabbed while waiting at a south east London bus stop with a friend. The case became a cause célèbre when the five suspects were tried and acquitted due to the lack of a murder weapon and forensic evidence, and the inconsistency of the four statements made by the murdered boyās friend; years of campaigning by Stephenās parents have led to no convictions, although the investigation continues (two of the suspects were arrested this past July for attacking a black policeman).
Greengrass harnesses Strasburgās jagged camerawork to chilling effect in depicting Stephenās killing, but reins it in as the film unfolds his parentsā frustrated attempts to bring the murderers to justice. Scenes in which unsympathetic police liaison officers interview the parents evince a Loachian mistrust of authority, but this masterpiece is pitched more as a story of human and legal failings than as outraged social realism. Greengrass takes care to contrast the ebbing resolve of Stephenās father, who drifts back to his original home in Jamaica, with the quiet determination of his wife, who stays to fight; Hugh Quarshie and Marianne Jean-Baptiste endow their roles with subtlety and power.
