Dead Man’s Shoes – An Eye For An Eye, But With A Brain

Article first published as Movie Review: Dead Man’s Shoes – An Eye For An Eye, But With A Brain on Blogcritics.

The opening credits of Dead Man’s Shoes (2004) are a collage between old home movie-type footage and a scene where two men are walking through the British countryside. One of them is carrying an army duffel and the other is wearing one of those slick material sports jackets. The one with the duffel is the returning soldier Richard (Paddy Considine) and the one tagging along is his brother Anthony (Toby Kebbell). Richard’s voice over says “God will forgive them. He will forgive them and allow them in to heaven. I can’t live with that.”

The “they” he is referring to are a gang of local toughs, namely the ring leader Sonny (Gary Stretch), Big Al (Seamus O’Neill), Herbie (Stuart Wolfenden), Tuff (Paul Sadot), Gypsy John (George Newton) and Soz (Neil Bell). This motley crew are barely even gangsters, rather a bunch of bullies and low level drug dealers.

This is a revenge movie, let’s be very clear about that. Right from the first moment the viewer is made aware that something has gone terribly awry and that it involves Anthony, who is mentally challenged. Richard left for the army and Anthony started hanging around with Sonny and the rest of his merry band of lowlifes. Something very, very bad happened, but the viewer is only given that story in short flashback instalments until the very end of the tale where the whole truth is revealed.

Up to that point, though, Anthony keeps Richard company as he goes after the thugs, one after the other. Richard is very methodical, well put together and organized. It takes him less than a week to accomplish his goal.

The villains in this story will feel familiar. They are bullies, no more, no less. Sonny is the leader and he always takes things too far. They pick on Anthony, coerce him into taking drugs, sexually molest him, mess with his mind and his emotions in cruel and deliberate ways. Even if Sonny is the worst one, the one that eggs the others on, the others are all followers, not necessarily blind, or mindless, because once they figure out who Richard is they very quickly cotton on to the fact that something bad is going to happen to them. The dynamic, as such, is seen in every school yard in every country on a regular basis, only here it is taken to the extreme.

Richard is clearly driven by more than just his need for revenge, even though that is what lies closest to the surface. He starts by intimidating the gang, but that very quickly escalates to him picking them off one by one. There certainly seems to be some satisfaction in the actual revenge for him, but it is a melancholy feeling in the more traditional Shakespearian sense. The very last scene more than makes up for any kind of genre cliché, of which there really are surprisingly few in effect here.

What I also appreciate about this particular tale is that there are moments of gruff humour, mostly in the tragicomic nature of the band of thugs, an unflinching approach to the scenes that show the actual bullying and how it all escalates and pulls all the participants along with it’s own inexorable momentum. It is devoid of any flash and remains realistic despite ghosts and connotations of the Golgata when we are shown Anthony’s last torment. The sense of intimacy derived from that makes it all more immediate.

The actors all give spectacular performances, from Paddy Considine, who is clearly unhinged in a very controlled and banked-down way, to Paul Hurstfield (Mark), who is the only one of the bullies with an actual conscience in effect.

This is a revenge tale, yes, but a complex one. It is hard to not feel that Richard is in some ways justified after having seen what was done to his brother. The very notion that you would pick on someone who is inherently weak and defenceless in such a cruel and sadistic way justifies Richard’s ire, if not his violence. And there is more to it than that, a cruel in-turned barb that you have to stay with the movie to catch. The true moral of any revenge tale, and this is why I brought up Shakespeare, and I can be even more specific and say Hamlet, is that nobody ever really wins.

I really recommend this one, for its intelligence, for its tragicomic qualities, for the very good performances and for the fact that it doesn’t flinch away from the group dynamics of bullying and that over and through all this there are deep biblical themes of old school eye-for-an-eye vengeance and the tolls that takes.

Dead Man’s Shoes (2004) directed by Shane Meadows and stars Paddy Considine (Richard), Tony Kebbell (Anthony), Gary Stretch (Sonny), Seamus O’Neill (Big Al), Jo Hartley (Jo), Stuart Wolfenden (Herbie), Paul Sadot (Tuff), Paul Hurstfield (Mark), Emily Aston (Patti), George Newton (Gypsy John), Neil Bell (Soz), Craig Considine (Craig) and Matt Considine (Matt).

This is England – murky moral ground and skinheads

This is England (2006) directed by Shane Meadows stars Thomas Turgoose (Shaun), Stephen Graham (Combo), Jo Hartley (Cynth), Andrew Shim (Milky), Vicky McClure (Lol), Jospeh Gilgun (Woody), Rosamund Hanson (Smell), Andrew Ellis (Gadget), Perry Benson (Meggy), George Newton (Banjo) and Frank Harper (Lenny).

The basic premise is that the twelve year old boy Shaun is having a hard time in the early 1983’s in England. He’s just lost his father in the Falkland wars and he is living with his mother in the poor part of town. The opening sequence shows a montage of 80’s news and sets the scene nicely. We then get introduced to the young Shaun who is bullied at school for wearing the wrong clothes and gets into a fight.

On his way home from school Shaun runs in to a pack of skinheads lead by Woody (Joseph Gilgun) and for some reason Woody takes pity on the young boy and tries to cheer him up. The dynamic of the skinhead pack is reminiscent of a pack of dogs, there’s a lot of snarling and physical correction of behaviour, but at the same time they act like Lost Boys with their own screwed up version of Peter Pan in the lead.

There’s a certain lawlessness to their behaviour, tinged with fantasy, and that has it’s appeal for the young Shaun, who has no other friends and nowhere to pour his anger. He quickly becomes accepted into their circle and adopts all the trappings of a little skinhead, boots and shirt and suspenders.

It’s not until Combo (Stephen Graham) appears on the scene that things take a sinister turn. Combo is fresh out of prison and clearly more political than the rest of the gang. Things get worse from here on out. The gang gets split up and Shaun, for reasons that seem very clear when you operate within the logic of the movie, opts to stay with Combo’s fraction.

It doesn’t end well, but then again, why would it?

It’s hard to avoid the parallel to Geoffrey Wright’s Romper Stomper (1992) and Tony Kaye’s American History X (1998), but there is, for lack of a better wording, a kind of innocence to this movie, probably largely due to the fact that the protagonist is so young. The unpremeditated cruelty of the very young lends itself to a more uncomplicated way of relating to this kind of behaviour. Shaun can’t see the sinister undercurrent to everything that Combo says, but we, the adult viewers, see it and understand it for what it is. It’s easy to be seduced by someone who promises to never leave you, to always look out for you and care for you, especially for a young boy like Shaun who has lost his father and is already toeing the line of acceptable behaviour.

It isn’t until Shaun gets to see Combo behave in a way that is not acceptable within the group, assaulting and beating up one of “their own” that Shaun wakes up to what kind of environment he has found himself in. Basically, it’s all fun and games until someone gets kicked in the head.

I’ve had issues with the convoluted morality of all three films mentioned here. I think it is mostly about the seduction – the attempt to portray these fractions from the inside with an insiders more forgiving eye, that makes them seem a little too lax. Even the attempts at moral anagnorisis always come up a little short. Shaun actually has to see his would be father-figure beat seven different kinds of crap out of someone before he clocks on to there being something wrong with this whole thing.

That being said, this is a movie that provides food for thought, gives at least a glimpse into the mechanisms behind what makes a group of people chose this lifestyle. The acting is solid all the way through, and that includes the young Thomas Turgoose, who plays Shaun with a lack of artifice that makes all the difference. The movie stands and falls with his performance so that was a clever piece of casting. Stephen Graham (Combo) also gives a very good performance especially in the scene ending with him assaulting Milky. You can literally see in his eyes where things start going wrong which adds to the sinking feeling in this viewers stomach.

All in all, this is a movie well worth watching. It’s funny in some places and very dark in others, and it is not simple and certainly not unambiguous, but then again – it really shouldn’t be. If it were, the director would have failed miserably.

Mule