Dir. Gary Love, UK, 2007, 92 mins
Cast: Steven Mackintosh, Ashley Walters, Andy Serkis, Tolga Safer, Adam Deacon
Review by Jean Lynch
One thing the British do rather well in film is social realism; from the kitchen sink dramas of the 50s and 60s, the free cinema of Lindsay Anderson, Michael Grigsby, et al, to Ken Loach changing government policy with Cathy Come Home, through to to the improvisation of Mike Leigh and lately the deft hand of Shane Meadows proclaiming This is England, life for the have-nots of this country has been sifted through and held up to a cinematic microscope for mass scrutiny for over half a century.
Today, the kitchen sink dramas are the stories of the sink estates – the high rise council estates that are home – if you can call it such – to disaffected youths whose future depends on how much dope, crack, weed, guns or whatever else they can get their hands on and peddle. Kidulthood expressed it just right, defining today’s modern underclass youth – a child forced to grow up too soon in order to cope with and then survive the hand that life has so viciously dealt them.
Sugarhouse follows this tradition. It tells the story of down-and-out East End boy D (Walters) who meets up with the respectable city-type ‘Tom’ (Mackintosh) to do a deal but one which crosses the local drug baron, Hoodwink (Serkis) in the process – and that’s a very, very silly thing to do.
And that, essentially, is it. It’s a story we’ve seen so many times before (and the filmmakers reference this themselves by the casting of Mackintosh, whose prodigious previous form includes Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels). And yet...
Sugarhouse is undeniably derivative. The opening street shots are reminiscent of Massive Attack’s Unfinished Sympathy video, and the film’s style often mimics the pop culture of Trainspotting. The setting of the cavernous, run-down garage harks back to Reservoir Dogs, as does the use of a Mexican stand-off, and there are references to mainstream cinema, including D’s ‘you talkin’ to me’ and, as he points a gun in Tom’s face, tells him ‘the question you should be asking yourself is...’. The film desperately wants to capture it’s audience and his happy to steal from any relevant source it can. Alongside this, the film was based on writer Dominic Leyton’s stage play ‘Collision’ and it shows.
The film should not work, but it does. It’s too entertaining to be pure social realism and the acting is sometimes quite clearly a performance, but what a staggering powerhouse of a film this is. The juxtaposition of the affluent Tom against the impoverished D is a direct reflection on the widening gap between Britain’s two tier society, and their developing, enforced relationship in the film is such that it makes the viewer take stock and realise that there’s a little of everyone in all of us – that the family man can turn to crime if the circumstances are right, and that someone on the fringes of society can have goodness of heart. It is a ‘there but for the grace of God go I’ movie and it’s message is firmly stated but not too overblown. Mackintosh and Walters get into the skin of their characters and make them both sympathetic and brutal in turn, handling the interplay between the two very tightly.
Added to this is Serkis’ peformance as the tattooed Hoodwink. This is possibly the most disturbing performance since Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet. Hoodwink is a portrait of barely contained rage, a simmering pot always about to blow it’s lid, a wild force of nature that will vent it’s unstoppable destructive power at anything or anyone in it’s path and, for the purposes of this story, today it’s hellbent on D.
A mention must also be given to Tolga Safer as Sef, a local ‘gang’ member out-of-his-depth. In his pristine-white shell suit and latest mobile phone, he tells Hoodwink that he can’t meet him to answer his questions as he has to go to college and, in fact, only in this game to pay his way through said institution. Again, here is the statement that not everything is black and white, that there is more to the people who populate such estates, defying the tendency of society to dehumanise them.
Besides such powerful performances – and full credit to first-time feature director Gary Love in getting these from his cast – the film has a great storyline, packed with heartstopping moments. It looks beautiful in the way an industrial sunset is beautiful – quite an achievement given the subject matter – and the use of location (shots between the rises of a broken staircase or underneath chicken wire) is executed artfully but without pretension. Finally, it is realistically violent, violent, violent but yet it never feels gratuitous. In short, a flawed but tremendously powerful and profound film that succeeds in hitting the spot with its message.
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