Young Adam Movie Review & Film Summary (2004) | Roger Ebert
YOUNG ADAM (2004)
Cast
Ewan McGregor as Joe
Tilda Swinton as Ella
Peter Mullan as Les
Emily Mortimer as Cathie
Jack McElhone as Jim
Therese Bradley as Gwen
Ewan Stewart as Daniel Gordon
Stuart McQuarrie as Bill
Written and directed by
David Mackenzie
Based on the novel by
Alexander Trocchi
http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/young-adam-2004[25/08/2013 12:33:25]
Young Adam Movie Review & Film Summary (2004) | Roger Ebert
Crime, Drama, Foreign, Romance, Thriller
Rated NC-17 explicit sexual content
93 minutes
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★ ★ ★ ☇ | Roger Ebert
April 30, 2004 | 0
Two men and a woman on a barge. No one who
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has seen Jean Vigo's famous film "L'Atalante"
Like
0
(1934) can watch "Young Adam" without feeling
its resonance. There cannot be peace unless the
0
woman or one of the men leaves. In the Vigo
film, newlyweds make the barge their
occupation and home, and the bride feels
pushed aside by the crusty old deckhand (the immortal Michel Simon).
In "Young Adam," the chemistry is more lethal. The barge is owned by
Ella Gault (Tilda Swinton), who has a loveless marriage with her
husband Les (Peter Mullan), and has hired the young and cocky Joe
Taylor (Ewan McGregor), who fancies himself a writer.
It is a foregone conclusion that Joe will eventually have sex with Ella, as
the barge Atlantic Eve trades on the dank canals between Glasgow and
Edinburgh, circa 1960. But that's really not the movie's subject, even
though it provides rich opportunities for Mullan, that intense and
inward Scotsman, to underplay his rage and suppress his feelings. (At
one point, as Les and Ella linger in bed, they hear Les' boots on the deck
overhead, and decide, "He's letting us know he's back.") No, the Atlantic
Eve is not the setting for adultery so much as for guilt and long silences.
As the film opens, Joe sees the body of a young woman, dressed only in
lingerie, floating in the canal. He uses a hook to pull it closer, and Les
helps him haul it on board. The police are summoned. It is a drowning,
perhaps a suicide. No foul play, apparently.
But Joe knows more about the body than he reveals -- more, much
more, than anybody would ever be able to discover, and he reads the
papers with interest as it is learned the woman was pregnant and that
her boyfriend, a plumber, has been charged with the murder.
Joe is a hard case. Opaque. Not tender, not good with the small talk.
Around women, he has a certain intensity that informs them he plans to
have sex with them, and it is up to them to agree or go away. He is not a
rapist, but he has only one purpose in his mind, and some women find
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Young Adam Movie Review & Film Summary (2004) | Roger Ebert
that intensity of focus to be exciting. It's as if, at the same time, he cares
nothing for them and can think only of them. No amount of sweet talk
would conquer them, but his eyes penetrate to their souls and rummage
around.
As the murder case goes to trial, Joe finds himself attending the court
sessions. He becomes fascinated by the defendant. Flashbacks fill in
chapters of Joe's earlier life, episodes known only to him, including a
moment when he could have acted, and did not, and does not even
begin to understand why he didn't. He is not a murderer but a man
unwilling to intervene, a man so detached, so cold, so willing to sacrifice
others to his own convenience, that perhaps in his mind it occurs that
he would feel better about the young woman's death if he had actually,
actively, killed her. Then at least he would know what he had done and
would not find such emptiness when he looks inside himself. This is an
almost Dostoyevskian study of a man brooding upon evil until it
paralyzes him.
Although Britain and Ireland now enjoy growing prosperity, any
working-class person 30 or older was raised in a different, harder
society. That's why actors like McGregor and Colin Farrell, not to
mention Tim Roth and Gary Oldman, can slip so easily into these hardedged, dirty-handed roles. With American actors, you have the feeling
they bought work clothes at Sears and roughed them up; with these
guys, you figure they got their old gear out of their dad's closet, or
borrowed their brother's. Mullan, who is older, is a sublime actor, too
much overlooked, who can play a working man with a direct honesty
that doesn't involve a single extra note. Look at him in "My Name Is
Joe," where he plays a recovering alcoholic who tries to help a friend
and risk a romance. As for Swinton, here is directness so forceful you
want to look away; she doesn't cave in to Joe because of his look but
because he can match hers.
A movie like "Young Adam" is above all about the ground-level lives of
its characters. The death of the girl and the plot surrounding it are
handled not as a crime or a mystery but as an event that jars characters
out of their fixed orbits. When you have a policy of behavior, a pose
toward the world, that has hardened like concrete into who you are, it
takes more than guilt to break you loose. It takes the sudden realization
that the person you created continues to function, but you are now
standing outside of him. He carries on regardless, and you are stranded,
alone and frightened.
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