What to say about Spud? John van de Ruit’s novel has been a South African publishing sensation, selling more copies of a novel than most authors manage to sell of anything, unless it’s the autobiography of Nelson Mandela (still our biggest seller as far as “retail” books go), or perhaps Wilbur Smith, who doesn’t do local editions.
Of course, the Johannesburg map book is still this country’s all-time continual bestseller, and not a bad read either, but that’s not mentioned on such lists anymore.
The first in Van de Ruit’s Spud series (the third book is now out) has been filmed, and the filmmakers doubtless expect, or at least devoutly wish for, a resounding success to match that of the book.
I can’t predict that will happen. Not having managed to read beyond the first few pages of Spud the book, I’m unable to guess authoritatively at the reasons for its huge success (though many find it hilarious and heart-warming), or whether the film has preserved whatever is special about the book.
Spud, the movie
The movie is reasonably amusing, though I’d hardly call it funny; it’s reasonably well made, too. That is to say, it’s not bad; but it’s not particularly good either, in my view.
This verdict will probably mean nothing to the hordes of Spud fans who will delight in a movie transcription of their favourite book, so take this review as coming from one who is not in the target market anyway.
The poetically named John Milton is a 13-year-old from a rather trashy Durban family who gets some kind of scholarship to a swish boarding school — one rather like Michaelhouse, I suspect, based on my very limited knowledge of swish boarding schools.
His eccentric mom and dad drop him off there on the first day of school, duly embarrassing John in the process. Then begins John’s integration into the school, the ritual male bonding of the boys who share his dorm, and so forth.
He gets the nickname “Spud” for genital reasons. This is perhaps what TS Eliot would call an “objective correlative” for Spud’s gradual maturation during the course of his first year at boarding school. Tied to that is his romantic life, torn as he is between two girls, but also desperate to establish his credentials as a man in the eyes of his coevals and dorm mates.
Alongside that, there is Spud’s encounter with his English teacher, an inspiring curmudgeon nicknamed “The Guv” and played by John Cleese.
Sharing
It seems relatively late in the day that The Guv hands Spud a copy of Paradise Lost, a long religious poem by the more famous John Milton.
Obviously it was only halfway through the film that The Guv became aware of Van de Ruit’s allusion in this department. It doesn’t seem that by leaving the home of his frankly nuts parents Spud has lost anything paradisal. Or, for that matter, that Paradise Lost is much of a follow-up to The Lord of the Rings, also recommended to young Spud by The Guv.
The Guv’s reading programme aside, there is much for Spud to get on with: his rowdy dorm mates and their rule-breaking plans, the fragile boy called Gecko with whom he bonds, and then the school’s stage adaptation of Oliver Twist as a musical.
This, by the way, has fresh music and lyrics because the school (or the filmmakers) presumably couldn’t afford the rights to songs from Oliver!
Spud is cast as the boy himself: the boy who, stuck in a vile Victorian orphanage, holds out his bowl and asks for more.
Spud himself would be within his rights to ask for more. More life, perhaps; more of what makes life exciting for someone about to turn 14 but stuck in a stuffy old boarding school.
Nowadays, that would probably be more sex and more drugs, but Spud’s school feels caught in another era, the 1970s or early 1980s, perhaps, though the film is nominally set in 1990.
This enables some minimal comment on the release of Nelson Mandela and the coming liberation of South Africa, as well as a political-emotional stand briefly taken by Spud himself. Then it’s pretty much forgotten about. So is any lingering air of the boyish homoeroticism of same-sex boarding schools.
Generally, the narrative flows smoothly, even if the voice-over representing Spud’s diary entries gets rather tiresome. Troye Sivan as Spud does a fine acting job, yet is rather upstaged by Jamie Royal as the offbeat Gecko.
Some good bits
Royal is, for my money, the best thing in the movie, but maybe I’m always going to sympathise with the oddball who resists the coercive masculine socialisation of the dormitory and the school.
Cleese is okay as The Guv, doing the expected, though The Guv’s “trajectory” as a character traces its arc from inspiration to disappointment and redemption with facile regularity.
This trajectory is a very smooth curve. If there’s another literary reference in his playing Fagin in the school’s Dickens adaptation, it has no resonance. The figure of the manipulator of boys for his own ends could have had some heft in a deeper, more serious picture.
Spud’s parents are played as wackos, which makes the world outside Spud’s school seem a comedy of the absurd and the ridiculous — another world, certainly.
By comparison Spud’s school life is a world of stately calm, however many fat boys get stuck in windows. Crossing the boundary between those worlds is the film’s oddest character, for me at least: that would be Spud’s main inamorata, played by Genna Blair.
She’s presumably no older than Spud, but she has dyed blonde hair, too much make-up and an irritatingly coquettish manner. I wouldn’t call her a character so much as a caricature. Her very presence in the film, plus the plot points it engenders, feels no more than appliqué.
The press release for Spud describes the central character as “sensitive and emptional”.
“Sensitive” I get; “emptional” is probably a typo: someone started typing “empathetic”, changed his or her mind, and so we get that weird hybrid.
It’s of no real significance, of course, but I couldn’t help wondering, while watching Spud, how “emptional” it would turn out to be. Not very, as it happens; Spud may be sensitive, but I can’t say Spud as a whole is.
It’s a slight comedy, larded with cute sentiment. By the time we got the final feel-good conspiratorial wink from The Guv and the obvious feel-good Spud reaction shot, I knew that it was only in relation to Gecko, and only passingly, that I had felt much emption at all.