Ratcatcher Series 7: The Contenders: A brilliant Scottish coming-of-age drama
Cooper, Rand Richards
SCREEN Rand Richards Cooper REALITY, COOKED & RAW 'Ratcatcher' & 'Series 7: The Contenders' Ratcatcher opens with a slowmotion close-up of a child spinning around in a lace curtain, and...
...Tonight's cast of killers...
...Commonweal 23 May 4,2001...
...Adulthood is a state of failure and lethargy, and family fun on a Saturday night means watching the old man make a drunken pass at your Ma while Tom Jones gyrates on the telly...
...he looks malnourished and scared, and tragically adult...
...Days later we watch James (William Eadie) foray back into the water, to where the bottom drops away and his friend disappeared...
...Contestants are armed, then unloosed to hunt each other across the malls and living rooms of suburban America...
...His father drinks...
...In the film's most affecting scene, the two sneak a bath together at her parents' flat...
...Soaping each other up, naked and giggling like mad, they're in a nether world between childhood and adolescence, their jolly, giddy play graced with an unconscious awareness of sex...
...It's bad enough having the shows themselves...
...Scottish director Lynne Ramsay's gritty debut film takes place in a 1970s Glasgow housing project that a lengthy sanitation strike has left overrun with garbage and rats—"notorious vectors of disease," a TV news spot puts it...
...Go, go, go...
...Now just go in there and do some damage...
...We watch the achievement-crazed parents of the teenager ferry her in their SUV to her target's house, help with her bulletproof vest, and urge the kid on: "This guy's an easy mark, honey...
...there's beauty here, the image announces, but harm as well...
...and yet—unlike Pelle—Ratcatcher isn't determined to make you weep...
...As James, first-time actor William Eadie belongs right up there with Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense and Anton Glanzelius in My Life as a Dog, to name two of my favorite child performances...
...If s too austere for that, too interested, in an almost clinical way, in human nature...
...Short on plot, long on character and atmosphere, Ratcatcher is a dark portrayal of urban childhood, tinged with pathos...
...In the end, Ramsay pushes her film's grim determinism a bit too far—further, anyway, than I wanted her to...
...Often appalling, Ratcatcher resists being heartbreaking, and its detachment comes off Commonweal 22 May 4,2001 as a strength...
...A coming-of-age film that charts the advent of death, sex, and the fallibility of parents, Ratcatcher treads well-trafficked ground...
...It's as if he is seeing things for the first Commonweal 20 May 4,2001 time, through the eyes of loss...
...A casting note—that's New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani's estranged wife, Donna Hanover, as Mom, screaming "Got your guns...
...But even a gifted young filmmaker needs something left to learn...
...and American viewers can't but feel a passing despair that such a scene—both the idea itself and the logistics of filming it, with young actors—is all but unimaginable on this side of the Atlantic...
...That you could take the dialogue away and still have the essence of Ratcatcher is a tribute to Ramsay and her director of photography, Alwin Kuchler, whose camera makes seemingly innocuous images speak volumes...
...Real people in real danger," is the bold motto of "The Contenders," "where the only prize is the prize that counts—your life...
...And you say you want to do parody...
...Venturing inside, he stares in awe at the gleaming fixtures...
...Complete with cheesy music and breathless voice-over—"Will Dawn be able to eliminate Jeff—or will her feelings for him get in the way...
...Drafted as a lookout while the older boys have at her, he feels the sympathy of a fellow outcast, and the two gradually forge an affection that is the closest thing to love in Ratcatcher...
...and the, um, scattershot humor of Series 7 misses as often as it hits...
...Because children's emotions are so often nonverbal, films of childhood need a face...
...Another day, James hops a city bus and rides it to the end of the line, a field out in the country where new housing is under construction...
...This is a terse and lonely movie, assembled out of images that lodge themselves with stubborn beauty in the mind's eye...
...Back outside, he romps through a neighboring wheat field, the image beautifully framed through the bathroom window...
...We're used to seeing an anonymous new suburban development as an emblem of ennui, for instance, but here we encounter it transformed into paradise, the gleaming porcelain bathroom a bower of delight in the eyes of a child for whom cleanliness is a fantasy...
...The environment is one of menacing poverty, a world of scabbed and filthy plaster, boarded-up windows, and a disused canal running along one edge of the project...
...Some of the best scenes take up James's budding friendship with Margaret Anne...
...Eadie has one, all right: His angular visage is all wariness and hurt...
...Space forbids spending much time on Series 7: The Contenders, Daniel Minahan's frenetic parody of realitybased television...
...Series 7 plays off its blatant violence against the squishy intimacy of contestant interviews that elicit the full range of therapytainment: distraught confessions, screaming bouts with siblings, heartfelt testimonials to one's own inner strength ("My faith has seen me through," says Connie, the nurse, shortly after blowing away another contender with a high-powered rifle...
...Actually, it's alarming to note that a parody of "Survivor" can score points without one's having ever watched an episode of the original: that's how saturated the mainstream media are with this stuff...
...There's a basic problem when the reality you're targeting is reality TV...
...I haven't seen so bleak a portrayal of childhood since Pelle the Conqueror...
...As I sit down to write this, tonight's news is recapping a lawsuit against an MTV reality show ("Jackass") on behalf of a boy who emulated one segment's stunt of covering himself with raw meat and barbecuing himself, along with a second lawsuit—for "emotional distress"— by two girl contestants who claim they were "mooned...and later spattered with feces" during the taping of another show, "Dude, That Sucks...
...and the attempt soon encompasses his entire life...
...It is an astonishing moment, one that rescues innocence and restores the girl to her childhood...
...when we see kids clamber up, laughing, to look into a hearse, their wholly amoral curiosity turns death into a game...
...SCREEN Rand Richards Cooper REALITY, COOKED & RAW 'Ratcatcher' & 'Series 7: The Contenders' Ratcatcher opens with a slowmotion close-up of a child spinning around in a lace curtain, and it's unclear at first whether we're seeing rapture or torture, suffocation or play...
...It makes you look where you don't want to, and captures a way of seeing that keeps coming back to you, hours and days later, like a dream...
...His teenage sister may be sneaking off to meet someone...
...and lies down with a sigh in the gleaming tub...
...Pitilessly Ramsay zeroes in on the child's view, focusing on the spindle of drool that hangs from Dad's mouth as he passes out on the couch, bringing a Polanski-like touch of the grotesque to the portrayal of James's estrangement...
...But Ramsay manages to make it new, investing the ugly with fascination and the mundane with a glow of joy...
...Danger lurks...
...The older neighborhood boys practice pointless cruelty upon animals and gang sex on a passive fourteen-year-old girl, Margaret Anne (Leanne Mullen...
...Satirizing a TV show is harder than, say, satirizing rock musicians (This Is Spinal Tap) or dog owners (Best in Shaw...
...It is Ramsay's brilliant insight to have a friendship begun amid drastic sexual degradation find novel forms of intimacy, as when James combs the lice out of Margaret Anne's hair ("Thaf s the wee beast there," he enthuses, holding out the comb—"See it...
...A nurse, an elderly curmudgeon, a spoiled teenage girl, an unemployed asbestos-removal worker, a moody artist, and our current champ, Dawn (Brooke Smith), a pregnant woman whose bouts of tearful reluctance yield to bellicose trash-talking come trigger time...
...he pees in the new toilet (not yet connected...
...and when two boys roughhouse in the murky water, one of them drowns, leaving the other, twelveyear-old James Gillespie, with a burden of horror, bewilderment, and guilt...
...Workers have gone home for the day, and James plays at the deserted site—first as laborer, hoisting a few shovelfuls of dirt, then homeowner...
...He's trying to fathom cause and effect, to understand where tragedy comes from and where it leads...
...And how much time would you really want to spend...
...Minahan's spoof mixes "Survivor" with live police shows, like "Cops," then takes the concept to its absurd extreme...
...When James tries to retrieve Margaret Anne's glasses, tossed into the canal by the toughs, he can't quite reach them, and the failure suggests a childhood in which every saving gesture falls short...
Vol. 128 • May 2001 • No. 9
