a review by Jeffrey Overstreet
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Director and writer – David Mackenzie
Based on the novel by Alexander Trocch
Director of photography – Giles Nuttgens
Editor – Colin Monie
Music by David Byrne
Production designer – Laurence Dorman
Producer – Jeremy Thomas
Sony Pictures Classics. 93 minutes. NC-17 for explicit male and female nudity and intense sequences of empty and destructive sexual behavior.
STARRING: Ewan McGregor (Joe), Tilda Swinton (Ella), Peter Mullan (Les), Emily Mortimer (Cathie), Jack McElhone (Jim), Therese Bradley (Gwen), Ewan Stewart (Daniel Gordon), Stuart McQuarrie (Bill), Pauline Turner (Connie), Alan Cooke (Bob M’bussi) and Rory McCann (Sam).
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Young Adam, a new movie starring the fantastic cast of Ewan McGregor, Tilda Swinton, and Peter Mullan, starts off beautifully. McGregor and Mullan play Joe and Les, two men working on a barge that plies the canals of Scotland. Les is married to Ella (Swinton), and they have a young boy. But the constraints of the barge mean that Joe lives with the family in the very tight-knit quarters below deck. A peek through the cracked wall, and Joe can see Les and Ella’s feeble attempts at lovemaking.
If the idea of love on a barge reminds you of the classic Jean Vigo film L’Atalante, then you know your film history. Instead of French romanticism, though, Young Adam gives us Scottish earthiness. McGregor and Mullan spend much of the film covered in coal dust, a fine metaphor for their earth-bound lives. A particularly good early scene involves Joe and Les shoveling coal, and the widescreen photography creates a marvelous sense of depth, as McGregor and Mullan are subsumed in their work, with gray skies looming overhead. The joyful moments of L’Atalante aren’t likely to make their appearance here.
Still, young Joe and Ella aren’t ready to give up on love yet, and they take solace in a sexually-explicit affair while Les is at the pub. Young Adam was given an NC-17 rating, which is probably appropriate, though it’s not as if you see things you haven’t seen in other arthouse movies (admittedly, the sight of a fly walking on Tilda Swinton’s breast is startling). Instead, it’s the accumulation of sex that provokes the adult moniker. Every other scene shows Ewan McGregor in bed with Swinton or flashes back to McGregor and earlier conquests. The flashbacks attempt to give a sense of who Joe is, but they merely reveal that Joe likes to have sex.
Indeed, this is one of the movie’s problems. The sex never feels exploitive or inappropriate, but its sheer prevalence interrupts both the plot and the character development. We don’t get a chance to find out who Joe is or why Ella’s willing to give up on Les. Furthermore, the social dimensions of the movie–the exploration of lower-class Scotland–are completely ignored in the film’s second half. The widescreen cinematography literally and figuratively becomes cramped and small. The movie is reduced to a tawdry affair.
Young Adam attempts to broaden its horizons with a murder and trial in the last act, but that feels tacked on. Joe is going through a moral crisis, but we don’t care by that point. And when he walks off into the gray-sky sunset, his enigma is no closer to being solved than when the movie started.