The Living and the Dead

‘The Living and the Dead’ (2006) is a curious English film written and directed by young newcomer Simon Rumley and draws heavily upon his own experiences watching his mother die tragically and slowly of cancer. It is a brave and profoundly autobiographical topic to undertake so early on in one’s feature directing career however unfortunately, like Rumley’s previous three run of the mill brit-flicks it lacks the required amount of maturity and pro-filmic qualities that such a portentous subject demand. It’s a shame as the initial premise is fascinating and occasionally hints beyond the issues of coping with terminal illness. Donald Brocklebank (Roger Lloyd-Pack) is an ex-lord and a previously wealthy owner of a large estate mansion in the English countryside which for undisclosed reasons he is on the brink of losing. On top of this his wife Nancy (Kate Fahy) is terminally ill and requires constant around the clock care. The largest of his problems however is his son James (Leo Bill), an overprotected and eternally childlike young man who needs constant anti-psychosis tablets to keep his deranged mind in check. Because of his fragile state James fails to see the rapid decay that surrounds his isolated family and misguidedly tries to help care for his dying mother.

A suitably bleak atmosphere is created by the opening shots of a large room filled with abandoned wheelchairs. The saturated morning sunlight peers through as the isolated figure of Donald approaches the screen. He looks extremely dishevelled with long bedraggled grey hair and sores on his face. Upon exiting the house, he stands on the porch and looks wistfully out towards an approaching car. The film then cuts to an earlier scene of Donald talking with his son in one of the many vast yet decaying rooms. This sets up an interesting flashback-based narrative that initially works well and provides some of the film’s most interesting and tense scenes, even if it doesn’t quite deliver in the end. Scenes featuring Donald and his son reveal the father’s extreme lack of patience for him that borders on sheer contempt. James is indeed annoying and clearly hard to care for but whether his condition is actually part of some medically diagnosed mental impairment or just a product of his isolated upbringing is never made clear, and the resulting ambiguity makes you as a viewer feel liberated into making your own mind up. Through the lengthy flashback sequences, it becomes clear that the young son’s deteriorating mental state and his mother’s rapidly failing health are the two main sources of drama. The mother Nancy has a regular carer who stays over when Donald is away. However, this time James manages to temporarily exclude the care-worker and without his father’s knowledge or consent decides to look after his mother himself, a task he is dangerously ill equipped to do. James is frequently shown taking multi-coloured pills from a cabinet in the kitchen in a much-repeated shot. It is presumed that these are anti-psychosis tablets. However, James somehow also takes drugs via a syringe too suggesting that he may too rely on heroin although where he would procure such hard narcotics in his rural retreat is annoyingly never specified. Naturally all these factors eventually combine to tragic effect and James’ mother is distressingly made worse by his frighteningly inept caring. There are clearly some Oedipus themes being hinted at here: as well as smothering his mother to the point of destruction James is openly contemptuous towards his father, as is he of him (“people don’t like you”, Donald tells his son early on in the film). However, any deeper meanings are sadly moot as the films self-consciously grim and dank visuals takes over.

From Ken Loach’s kitchen sink tragedies to the warts and all drug nightmare of Trainspotting (1996), gritty has always been a key noun in describing British film but while those films achieved a sublime expressivity through respect for their subjects here Rumley seems to want to merely rub our faces in the dirt and shock us. Every bodily function mishap or severe mental breakdown is rendered in excruciating detail, while a heavenly-white drug hallucination scene is seemingly included only as an excuse to invent a scene in which James’ imagined father slashes his wrists with a knife. When eventually the concerned care-worker returns with a policeman in tow to break into the house the mother is found severely weakened by James’ psychotic care scheme. Wracked by guilt he proceeds to go on a drugs binge, jabbing three different needles into his forearm at once then bashing them around in fits of rage. It’s unnecessarily gruesome and gratuitous and leaves nothing to the imagination, another example of the director using a powerfully tragic storyline to present us with needlessly harsh visuals. Themes of mortality, drug-addiction, and psychosis should provide enough drama without resorting to visual shock tactics. Instead, Rumley’s film occasionally comes alive through its creative use of editing particularly during the aforementioned scene in which the policeman and the nurse break in. The build up to this confrontation is juxtaposed with a similar situation set in the present as the now aged Donald glimpsed only briefly throughout the film is also subject to a care worker breaking into his home. In both scenes a chase ensues creating breath-taking tension which culminates in a stunning rapidly edited cut between the same square staircase shot from below looking directly up which father and son transcend simultaneously separated only by time. Not only does this look great it also hints at the generational gap between the father and son and their similar mental (and in this case literal) descent into madness and suffering. Sadly, such visual flourishes are rare. Instead, Rumley often destroys any notion of formal/visual unity by resorting to clichéd camera tricks and effects. For example, every time James first takes his drugs or suffers a particularly manic episode, which is very often, Rumley uses fast-motion sound-tracked by abstract techno music to signify this state of mind. These sequences simply serve to undermine the sparse understated direction that benefits the rest of the film. Such subjects, settings, and a deliberately minimal plot deserve a consistently slow and considered directing approach, but these drug episodes are simply too much of a stylistic departure and so seem incongruous and dated. The sudden inclusion of modern sounding music also clashes unfavourable with the effective minimal piano score used elsewhere.

The plot is suitably thin, but it does beg a few questions. The reason Donald is losing his estate is never specified nor is the reason for his departure. James suddenly takes charge of the situation in his own twisted way with such relative ease (he simply locks the nurse out) that it’s surprising that this has never happened before and that the father would be so negligent. The flashback structure works very well only up until the aforementioned confrontation scene which occurs about forty-five minutes into the film. By the end further flashbacks and drug induced dream sequences muddy the narrative waters rather than add to the ambiguous nature of the film and so the climax is relatively mute and disappointing compared to earlier more realistically dramatic scenes. The acting is also uneven. Lloyd-Pack, recognisable to most people as the gormless Trigger from Only Fools and Horses, gives Donald a commendable amount of faded glory and unsympathetic defeatism although he is hardly present throughout much of the film. Kate Fahy as the mother isn’t given much more to do than look ill and cry out in despair at her son’s unwanted mistreatment of her. Although flashbacks to earlier times reveal a tender caring side to her it would have been interesting to have fleshed this character out further with some first-hand accounts of how she would deal with such cruel treatment. This leaves the greatest acting responsibility on Leo Bill’s young shoulders and it perhaps proves to be too demanding a role for him. While he convincingly screams and conveys frustration and psychosis his calmer moments of childlike innocence are annoying. He is probably meant to represent a caring son warped by his mental demons but instead he comes across as almost criminally vicious particularly in scenes in which he force-feeds his poor mother a damagingly high amount of her medication childishly believing that the more she takes, the better she will get. Considering James seems relatively successful in medicating himself this merely comes across as unnecessarily nasty. His general mannerisms veer between occasionally convincing and overtly hammy and are highly reminiscent of Rik Mayall in, well, every role he ever does thus making the film hard to take seriously and harder to sit through.

All of the actions, apart from a funeral near the end, take place in the isolated country house and involve the same three characters. This makes the film appear like a badly adapted theatre production. Like recent very differing play adaptations the ‘History Boys’ (2006) and ‘Hard Candy’ (2005) it often lacks pro-filmic qualities that set movies apart from the acting and dialogue driven and minimal set world of theatre production. Although the ‘Living and the Dead’ was actually written directly for the screen perhaps it would have worked better as a pared downplay using slightly more experienced actors.

Country: UK
Budget:
Length: 83mins

Filmography:
‘Hard Candy’, 2005, David Slade, Vulcan Productions
‘History Boys’, 2006, Nicholas Hytner, Free Range Films
'Trainspotting', 1996, Danny Boyle, Channel Four Films

Pub/2008

More like this:
The Nine Lives of Thomas Katz, 2000, directed by Ben Hopkins
Irma Vep, 1996, directed by Olivier Assayas
Irreversible, 2002, directed by Gaspar Noe