Film Review
Director Danny Boyle's career got off to a flying start with this
deliciously macabre black comedy, earning himself instant recognition
as one of the most exciting new British film directors of the decade
whilst setting a virtual unknown named Ewan McGregor on the road to
stardom. With its savagely dark humour, unsympathetic characters
and shocking doses of ultra-violence,
Shallow
Grave was all too readily likened to Quentin Tarantino's debut
feature
Reservoir Dogs (1992) and
critics were quick to dub Boyle the Tarantino of British cinema.
Whilst the film was generally well-received and proved to be a box
office hit (grossing 20 million dollars, a healthy return on its modest
2.5 million dollar budget), it wasn't until Boyle unleashed his next
film,
Trainspotting (1996) that he
secured international acclaim and earned his ticket to Hollywood.
Like its titular grave, the film's plot has little in the way of depth,
but if you are worried about that you are somewhat missing the point of
the film. The familiar neo-noir trappings are skilfully employed
but these are really just a pretext for what
Shallow Grave is really about,
which is the ephemeral nature of friendship and the ease with which
loyalties can be decimated by private materialistic goals. Danny
Boyle and his faithful screenwriter John Hodge would revisit the same
theme in
Trainspotting, which
is less about drugs abuse and more about the impossibility of
sustaining friendships in an increasingly individualistic
society. Like Mark Renton and his drug-addicted buddies in
Boyle's second film, the three main protagonists of
Shallow Grave allow themselves to
be torn apart by greed, their friendly mutual antagonism giving way to
something far darker, far deadlier, when they realise that theirs is a
genuinely dog-eat-dog world. What is most unsettling about this
film is not its near-the-knuckle violence, nor its bouts of casual
sadism, but the corrosively cynical way in which it dissects human
relationships and reveals what we are all capable of - betraying our
closest friends for our own self-interest.
Another striking similarity with
Trainspotting
is the fact that Boyle and Hodges appear determined to prevent us from
liking their main characters. Alex, David and Kerry are each a
prime example of the late 1980s yuppie - shallow, self-centred and
totally amoral. They are forced together by a mutual need, so
that they can hang out in a swanky apartment which none of them could
individually afford to rent. It takes them virtually no time at
all to agree to keep the illicitly obtained money and dispose of its
owner, which they do with chillingly cold detachment. What
redeems them, and makes them interesting enough to engage with, is the
fact that they are such an ineffectual bunch. They stumble into their
crime adventure with all the elegance of someone tripping headfirst
down a disused mineshaft. The fact that they are totally out of
their depth and become trapped in a Hell of their own making makes up
for their obvious lack of charm and moral awareness. They get
what they deserve, but we wince just a little at their grisly
comeuppance. Everyone loves an amateur, even an amateur
gravedigger with homicidal tendencies.
The film's main interest is the way in which the three main characters
evolve in the course of their nightmarish exploits. Alex, the
brash tabloid hack, is the one who first strikes us as the monster of
the trio. By comparison, Juliet and David are models of
restraint, reluctant accomplices in his scheme. But as Alex
begins to wake up to the horror of his predicament and becomes slightly
more human, David goes the other way, transformed from a mild-mannered
chartered accountant into a fully-fledged psychopath. In the end,
it is Juliet who is shown to be the worst of the three, driven to
monstrous excesses by an insane desire to escape from a hell she can no
longer endure.
Hodge's intelligent character-focussed screenwriting and the enjoyably
feisty performances from the three leads - Christopher Eccleston and
Kerry Fox show that they are more than a match for Ewan McGregor -
provide the meat and bone to what might otherwise have been just
another anaemic little thriller. For its sins,
Shallow Grave does occasionally
wallow in its tacky grand guignol excesses, but Boyle's off-the-wall,
energetic direction and Hodge's twisted humour makes up for its
occasional lapses, and overall it offers a compelling and satisfying
movie experience, albeit one that is ever so slightly unnerving.
If you want to bury a friendship, this is definitely
not the way to do it.
© James Travers 2012
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Film Synopsis
Alex, David and Juliet are three friends who share a roomy flat in a
trendy part of Edinburgh. Even though they are all professionals
(respectively a journalist, accountant and doctor), they need a fourth
flatmate if they are to pay their exorbitant rent. Having
interviewed several prospective candidates, they finally find someone
as cool, sophisticated and likeably weird as they are, a slightly
sinister man named Hugo. The three friends barely have time to
get to know their new flatmate, because the day after he moves in they
find him lying dead on his bed, apparently having taken a fatal drugs
overdose. Juliet's first reaction is to call the emergency
services, but she changes her mind when a suitcase stuffed with
banknotes is found under Hugo's bed. Alex, David and Juliet now
have a choice. They can either notify the police and hand over
the money, as any decent law-abiding citizen should. Or they can
dispose of the body and keep the money for themselves. It doesn't
take the three friends long to agree on the latter course. But
not long after they have buried Hugo (and mutilated his corpse so that
it cannot be identified), they are visited by a pair of no-nonsense
hoodlums who are determined to get back their booty. Fortunately,
David is by this stage a fully paid-up member of Psychopaths Anonymous
and has no intention of giving up the hard earned cash to anyone.
Two more dead bodies and two more furtive late night burials later,
Alex and Juliet begin to get a little worried about their friend.
Who is next in line for a shallow grave...?
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.