David Mackenzie is the young British director whose debut feature, The Last Great Wilderness, was an intriguing, untidy beast of a film. I liked it; others didn’t. His new film, Young Adam, is based on the novel of sinister and transient bohemianism by the all-but-forgotten Scottish beat author Alexander Trocchi, and it is a conspicuously more mature piece of work.
Everything about this adaptation shows it to be a labour of love: the intensely focused performances, the lugubrious and sensuous cinematography by Giles Nuttgens, the intelligent production design from Laurence Dorman, which conveys 1950s Glasgow. It is a dreamy, disquieting study of sexual tension and guilty secrets. The movie drifts downriver, like the tatty barge on which it is set, towards its finale at a sensational murder trial.
It has its faults — implausibility and absurdity in its sexual imbroglios and a narrative structure that tends towards the elusive. But this is really impressive, accomplished work from Mackenzie.
Young Adam is about a crime of passion, which is neither exactly criminal nor exactly passionate. It all revolves around the corpse of a young woman dragged out of the river Clyde one day by two itinerant barge workers. They are Joe and Les, played by Ewan McGregor and Peter Mullan. Joe is a shiftless sort of guy, always lethargically puffing at a roll-up and gazing broodingly into the middle distance. Les is an older man, married to the barge’s owner, Ella (Tilda Swinton). She is technically the employer of both men, and lives cheek-by-jowl with them and her little boy on the narrow boat, hauling coal.
For my money, this is the best performance of McGregor’s career by a long way: subtle and complex. He’s no straightforward good guy; his quiet, personable demeanour conceals weakness and arrogance — a would-be writer who abandoned his vocation and now resembles an artist only in moodiness. Mullan gives another excellent performance: a humane and compassionate view of Les, the hard drinker and hard worker who sees nothing accumulating in his life.
Swinton is always a riveting screen presence, even when her patrician charisma cannot quite be accommodated in the confines of a particular role, which is arguably the case here. Her Ella is dowdy and fierce, then blooming into beauty as she cultivates a long-dormant taste for pleasure.
All this happens in tandem with flashbacks of Joe’s past romance with Cathie (Emily Mortimer). Mackenzie gets a very strong performance from Mortimer, too — and she has to carry the film’s most bizarre scene, an ambiguous rape. The act appears to exist within the mysterious unknowability of what is effectively a bad marriage.
The closing act shows Mackenzie slightly at a loss, I think, about where to take Joe. His sexual adventures verge on the ridiculous, and Ella is remarkably trusting about letting him go to the pictures with her widowed sister. But Young Adam is wound up with a robustly dramatic and vividly demonstrative trial scene that endows it with solidity and permanence.
Mackenzie has a sure, visual touch and a mastery of cinematic language, at least in embryo. — Â