director
Danny Boyle
screenwriter
John Hodge
producer
Andrew Macdonald
cinematographer
Brian Tufano
music
Simon Boswell
editor
Masahiro Hirakubo
cast
Kerry Fox (Juliet Miller)
Christopher Eccleston (David Stephens)
Ewan McGregor (Alex Law)
Ken Stott (McCall)
Keith Allen (Hugo)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 93m
u.s.
release: February 10,
1995
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other danny
boyle films
reviewed on this website:
- the
beach
- a
life less ordinary
- trainspotting
- 28
days later
|
I
never thought I'd look back on the remorseless black comedy Blood
Simple as a model of compassion, but I've now seen Shallow
Grave, which makes Blood Simple look like Forrest
Gump. A self-consciously stylish thriller from (of all
places) Scotland, the movie is a grating sensual experience --
like John Carpenter's Halloween,
it gets on your nerves and stays there. But Carpenter also allowed
you to care about his characters, and Shallow Grave, I'm
afraid, is too hip for that. Director Danny Boyle, working from
a skeletal script by John Hodge, distances us from the main characters
-- a doctor (Kerry Fox, from An Angel at My Table), a
tabloid journalist (Ewan McGregor), and an accountant (Christopher
Eccleston) sharing a simple, spacious flat -- so that we become
jaded spectators to their decline. Unable to fear for them, we
wonder how low they will sink, what exponentially vile forms
their moral squalor will take.
Boyle is a playful director; the movie is enjoyable for a while
as it skitters across the surface. But if you want it to go deeper,
you're at the wrong show. I wonder if Boyle, having committed
to the script and realized too late that there really isn't one,
tried to compensate with a busy camera and random poetic visuals.
At one point, the accountant, who is going wacko, hides up in
the attic and drills holes through the floor, to spy on his roomies.
The light from below comes flooding up through the attic floor,
sending dozens of white spotlights pointing every which way through
the gloom. It's very pretty. Problem is, the sound of a drill
squealing through wood at all hours would bring the landlord
running, or at least make the neighbors mighty curious. Shallow
Grave almost never makes common sense.
The movie falls into a film noir lockstep without much
conviction. At the beginning, the three roommates brutally reject
anyone who applies for the empty room in their flat. If they're
going to be this antagonistic, why are they looking for another
lodger in the first place? To get cheap jollies from turning
down uncool people? They settle on a mysterious, saturnine man
(Keith Allen) who claims to be a writer. We pick up flashes of
bad vibes from him, but he isn't around long. He OD's in his
room, leaving behind a suitcase full of money. The roommates,
who are young professionals, see the money as a kick they can't
pass up. Immediately, Boyle and Hodge have violated the emotional
core of film noir: sweaty desperation as the trigger
for evil. These yupster Scots aren't hard up for cash. The doctor
and the journalist spend the money stupidly, while the accountant
scowls. He, you see, had been charged earlier with the ghastly
task of dismembering the dead man. This seems to have popped
a few of his synapses -- a development the movie barely moves
itself to explore. The cut-up body molders in its shallow grave,
symbolizing whatever you want it to. Meanwhile, a three-way paranoia
sets in at the flat. Life starts crumbling down.
Shallow Grave will impress those who have never seen Rope,
the intricately subtle stunt by Alfred Hitchcock. By saying that,
I don't mean to sound like a film snob. Rope wasn't art;
it was very much a machine -- Hitchcock testing himself, placing
two dislikable characters at the center of a static movie. In
that film, based glancingly on the Leopold-Loeb case, two brilliant,
vicious students strangle someone for the sheer intellectual
thrill of it, stash the corpse in a trunk, and throw a dinner
party around it. Except for one shock-cut to the face of James
Stewart (playing a professor whom the students assume will approve
of their crime), Rope appeared to consist entirely of
one 80-minute unbroken take, an effect Hitchcock achieved by
"invisible" cuts at the end of every reel. Shallow
Grave tries nothing so bold, and since the characters are
not actually murderers (not at first, anyway), there's nothing
at stake. To keep us alert, Boyle and Hodge resort to introducing
a pair of thugs who are after the suitcase; they show up every
so often to torture people to death. The people they butcher
mean nothing to us, and after a while we stop wincing at their
brutality.
This leads to the movie's most ruinous scene. Through some excellent
detective work that Boyle doesn't confide to us, the thugs trace
the money to the threesome. They interrupt the doctor and journalist
at dinner (how rude), while the loony accountant hovers over
the cash in the attic. The thugs rough up the other two roomies,
and the accountant lies in wait. Tipped to the money's whereabouts,
the thugs head up to the attic, and a stupid dread settles over
you -- the insensate twitchiness you feel at cheap horror movies,
where bimbos stumble through darkness and you wait for something
to spring out at them. Our nerves respond as expected, but we
don't give a damn whether the accountant ambushes the thugs,
or the thugs kill him, or a giant spider crawls out and kills
everybody. And guess what? Nothing crucial to the plot comes
of this anyway. Now three bodies are found in the shallow
grave instead of one. But these men are lowlife killers, and
the authorities mount a major investigation into the murders
of these three marginal criminals. Are the Scottish police that
hard up for things to do?
Shallow Grave falls apart loudly from there. Boyle pumps
himself up into a gory shoot-the-works climax; by then, the movie
has forfeited any pretense of reality, though the violence at
the end gives us a bit of a hard pinch. The characters keep shifting
allegiances, which might have meant something if they'd had a
shred of loyalty to violate. There's a reversal and another reversal;
twin sick jokes seal the movie, and the audience goes out buzzing.
But what they buzz about is the mindless stress of being roughly
handled for two hours. Shallow Grave is a death tease.
It keeps promising something baroque and disgusting, and finally
you get it. It's pathetically easy for a thriller to make you
feel physically menaced; the dozens of awful slasher films in
the early '80s did that. What's difficult is making the audience
feel emotionally menaced. The
Silence of the Lambs did it quite elegantly, and Roman
Polanski did it in the recent Death
and the Maiden and every other thriller he's made. Danny
Boyle is a gifted director, and Shallow Grave isn't a
weighted dud. He takes you for a ride. But his movie has the
soul of a maggot, and the wicked novelty of people behaving abominably
only goes so far. At some point, ordinary human compassion must
take up the slack. Boyle isn't a zippy enough director to make
up for what's missing. No one is. |