England Is Mine (15.)
Directed by Mark Gill.
Starring Jack Lowden, Jessica Brown Findlay, Jodie Comer, Laurie Kynaston, Simone Kirby, Adam Lawrence. 94 mins.
“...and it owes me a living.” What a lyric, what a band, what a balls up has been made of this pre-fame Morrissey-before-he-was-a-Smith film. The Mancunian music biopic has an esteemed pedigree with the magnificent Factory Record film 24 Hour Party People and the Ian Curtis film Control. I guess it was inevitable that The Smiths would be dealt with in some way (after all they took so much of their imagery from British cinema) but this telling of the early pre-fame days of Steven Patrick Morrissey is an adolescent gloom fest so overwrought you may have to bite your fist to avoid a fit of the giggles.
Its biggest problem is that it takes Morrissey at face value. I think most fans of The Smiths always assumed there was an element of jest in those gloomy lyrics; that lines like “I was looking for a job, and then I found a job, and heaven knows I'm miserable now,” or “The rain falls hard on a humdrum town,” were at least partially ironic. His autobiography though suggested that he was exactly the po-faced misery gut his detractors painted him as, (or that he was really committed to the maintenance of that image.) The film begins with him contemplating suicide and the makers of this piece of fan fiction are determined that not one single chink of light shall be allowed to brush across their beloved martyr's face.
The other big problem is that you never believe for a single moment that this figure on screen has any connection to the future pop star. Lowden calls to mind any number of performers - at times he's like James McAvoy playing the Bug Cort role in Harold and Maude; or Michael Sheen doing a young Alan Bennett playing some rebel without a cause - but never in the least bit Morrissey. The iconic historical figure he bears an uncanny resemblance to is 70s sitcom star Richard O' Sullivan. And though it is hard to imagine that the man who would go on to be the Man About The House and the Robin in Robin's Nest had quite such a doom laden adolescence, it would explain why women keep throwing themselves at the big screen Morrissey. He wilts from their touch like Kenneth Williams being assailed by Hattie Jacques, but he is rarely seen without a bird on his arm.
The problem with choosing to make a film about him when he was a nobody waiting for the world to acclaim his genius, is that it has no genius to show us. (There's none of the music, obviously, this being entirely unauthorised.) He is constantly scribbling notes in his pad, but the only lines we get to hear is his assertion that everybody in the world is an idiot, except him, a line written down by every other teenager in the world. (His wittiest line is, “nothing worth doing in life involves repetition,” spoken like a true celibate.) There is no wit, or hint of talent to leaven his arrogance and insufferable self regard.
Steven Patrick would find his niche as part of a double act. Here, he is Eric without his Ern, Little without his Large. The audience spends the whole film waiting for the, much teased, much foreshadowed, arrival of Johnny Marr (Kynaston, who was the young Danny Baker in From the Cradle to the Grave), much in the way men dragged to see Titanic prayed for the arrival of the iceberg as an instrument to put them out of their misery. But we also know that it will be too little too late.
The movie is a comically ill conceived venture, but not without talent. Gill stages the scenes well and his presentation of late 70s/early 80s Manchester as a perpetually overcast goldfish bowl of misery is thorough. You suspect that Lowden has talent and could excel in a role suited to him: his version of Morrissey is a disastrous conception, but a very well performed disastrous conception. (And you will just have to take my word for it that I wrote those words before seeing him in Dunkirk, where he is outstanding and absolutely unrecognisable from here.)
No doubt, Morrissey himself will make vile pronouncements on this venture, and cast aspersions on all who sail in it, but he will be secretly chuffed to bits that it has failed so completely to get him. Maybe then I should be mildly indignant on his behalf, because this film presents him as a quite hateful figure, and he deserves better than that. I know he is something of a knob and prone to fanaticism, but he did have an almost perfect turn of phrase, especially right at the beginning of his career. If Bob Dylan, that poor man's Mark E. Smith, can get the Nobel Prize, at least we could give Morrissey a semi-decent movie.
Directed by Mark Gill.
Starring Jack Lowden, Jessica Brown Findlay, Jodie Comer, Laurie Kynaston, Simone Kirby, Adam Lawrence. 94 mins.
“...and it owes me a living.” What a lyric, what a band, what a balls up has been made of this pre-fame Morrissey-before-he-was-a-Smith film. The Mancunian music biopic has an esteemed pedigree with the magnificent Factory Record film 24 Hour Party People and the Ian Curtis film Control. I guess it was inevitable that The Smiths would be dealt with in some way (after all they took so much of their imagery from British cinema) but this telling of the early pre-fame days of Steven Patrick Morrissey is an adolescent gloom fest so overwrought you may have to bite your fist to avoid a fit of the giggles.
Its biggest problem is that it takes Morrissey at face value. I think most fans of The Smiths always assumed there was an element of jest in those gloomy lyrics; that lines like “I was looking for a job, and then I found a job, and heaven knows I'm miserable now,” or “The rain falls hard on a humdrum town,” were at least partially ironic. His autobiography though suggested that he was exactly the po-faced misery gut his detractors painted him as, (or that he was really committed to the maintenance of that image.) The film begins with him contemplating suicide and the makers of this piece of fan fiction are determined that not one single chink of light shall be allowed to brush across their beloved martyr's face.
The other big problem is that you never believe for a single moment that this figure on screen has any connection to the future pop star. Lowden calls to mind any number of performers - at times he's like James McAvoy playing the Bug Cort role in Harold and Maude; or Michael Sheen doing a young Alan Bennett playing some rebel without a cause - but never in the least bit Morrissey. The iconic historical figure he bears an uncanny resemblance to is 70s sitcom star Richard O' Sullivan. And though it is hard to imagine that the man who would go on to be the Man About The House and the Robin in Robin's Nest had quite such a doom laden adolescence, it would explain why women keep throwing themselves at the big screen Morrissey. He wilts from their touch like Kenneth Williams being assailed by Hattie Jacques, but he is rarely seen without a bird on his arm.
The problem with choosing to make a film about him when he was a nobody waiting for the world to acclaim his genius, is that it has no genius to show us. (There's none of the music, obviously, this being entirely unauthorised.) He is constantly scribbling notes in his pad, but the only lines we get to hear is his assertion that everybody in the world is an idiot, except him, a line written down by every other teenager in the world. (His wittiest line is, “nothing worth doing in life involves repetition,” spoken like a true celibate.) There is no wit, or hint of talent to leaven his arrogance and insufferable self regard.
Steven Patrick would find his niche as part of a double act. Here, he is Eric without his Ern, Little without his Large. The audience spends the whole film waiting for the, much teased, much foreshadowed, arrival of Johnny Marr (Kynaston, who was the young Danny Baker in From the Cradle to the Grave), much in the way men dragged to see Titanic prayed for the arrival of the iceberg as an instrument to put them out of their misery. But we also know that it will be too little too late.
The movie is a comically ill conceived venture, but not without talent. Gill stages the scenes well and his presentation of late 70s/early 80s Manchester as a perpetually overcast goldfish bowl of misery is thorough. You suspect that Lowden has talent and could excel in a role suited to him: his version of Morrissey is a disastrous conception, but a very well performed disastrous conception. (And you will just have to take my word for it that I wrote those words before seeing him in Dunkirk, where he is outstanding and absolutely unrecognisable from here.)
No doubt, Morrissey himself will make vile pronouncements on this venture, and cast aspersions on all who sail in it, but he will be secretly chuffed to bits that it has failed so completely to get him. Maybe then I should be mildly indignant on his behalf, because this film presents him as a quite hateful figure, and he deserves better than that. I know he is something of a knob and prone to fanaticism, but he did have an almost perfect turn of phrase, especially right at the beginning of his career. If Bob Dylan, that poor man's Mark E. Smith, can get the Nobel Prize, at least we could give Morrissey a semi-decent movie.
