The first installment of the British miniseries Red Riding — 1974–is better than any film I’ve seen thus far this year. It’s a little flawed–a little too in love with impressionistic love scenes, but emphasis on me nagging when I should be crowing. Performances across the board are phenomenal, particularly a late-arriving heavy played with thick shaggy mane and thick shaggy Yorkshire accent by Sean Bean. It’s gorgeously filmed, almost impossible to tell it was television, given such rigorous attention to ’70s-influenced widescreen compositions and a showboat tracking shot or two. The story begins with and ostensibly centers on a possible serial killer, taking little girls, but that mystery is a thread through a thicket — dense social and political context, a thick ash-cloud gray-sky atmosphere, and a poisoned moral universe….
I got the UK dvd set, but I’d say this’d be very much worth catching in the theaters, as it sneaks around the country.
I saw this over the weekend as well. Plenty of familiar narrative and visual tropes (the idealistic journalist, the wall collage of mounting evidence pointing toward the truth, rampant civic corruption, too many pints of lager, bad wallpaper, and, yes, impressionistic love scenes), but the director sustains a viscously dreadful atmosphere throughout (Sidney Lumet meets David Lynch) and the ending is a kicker. Sean Bean is great, though Andrew Garfield (playing the kid reporter) was much more believable in 2007’s Boy A. I’m looking forward to part two with Paddy Considine.
Where’d you get Boy A? Agallillelay ownloaday? I don’t see it available yet….
If I grade 5 more papers I will let myself see 1980 tonight…. 15-20 page behemoths….
I think I rented Boy A from Blockbuster (but Netflix tells me I gave it three stars two years ago and I was living in the new house two years ago and had mostly stopped visiting BB). I definitely saw it via a rented DVD. You can buy a copy from Amazon for $18. Don’t know why Netflix doesn’t have access to it. Or you might only wish to pay seven bucks.
Just finished 1980. A bit more sober and less sensational or visually engaging than 1974. Fucking Leeds man! Who would ever want to visit that city? More later when you’ve seen it. Ep was directed by fellow who directed the doc Man on a Wire.
I decided to wait a couple nights. I watched The Messenger tonight–damn it was well-acted. And sad. Why did I watch that after grading all day? I should have gone with depressing Yorkshire gloom.
The interesting thing about Red Riding is that it truly is a mini-series. Even though there were three filmmakers and three ways to make films (16mm, 35mm, and hi-def digital video), everything is intricately interconnected. I was a bit confused by part two, left with too many questions, still trying to sort through who’s who and what’s what (at times subtitles would be useful but I managed . . a programme, however, would be nice). Certainly 1980 has a narrative with beginning, middle and another kicker of an ending, but I felt as if I was missing out on important pieces of information. The second film in no way stands alone, but if the first ten minutes of 1984 are any indication, everything is going to come together in the end. This is highly sophisticated, morally ambiguous, visually provocative storytelling – television the way it should be. Not even States of Play can match its scope and scale nor its malevolent measure of grime and perversion.
“Television the way it should be”? Yes, I wrote those words last night but take them all back. This is not to say the third episode of the series is in any way a let down (yes, nearly all of the pieces come together in the end), but the completed puzzle reveals a Gothic, grisly and prurient, “only-in-fiction” universe that made me want to take a shower. I had hoped the series would focus more on the backroom machinations of the corrupt, morally repugnant West Yorkshire Police. I was looking for a different kind of poetic justice. Ugh.
Thank you Manohla Dargis: “The ‘Red Riding’ trilogy looks fine blown up on the big screen, though it’s easier to watch at home, where the remote offers fast relief from a grim fiction that, with its murky palette and unyielding cruelty, serves up a nihilistic vision that is unyielding, hermetic, unpersuasive and finally self-indulgent . . . What matters in the movies are some of the performances and the slickly packaged sadism. Nothing else on screen is at stake, certainly not life or hope.”
Are you both watching region 2 versions of this? It not on the big screen anywhere around here.
Yeah, I’ve got the UK discs. (I think it’s supposed to hit the US dvd soon/ish…) I will finish this up over the weekend, and see if I’m more into slickly packaged sadism than Jeff. (That’s probably a rhetorical question.)
Jeff–the definition of what “television should be” varies between us. I think Match Game ’74 is what television should be: shag carpetting, lame innuendo,gigantic brown ties and witty banter between Brett Sommers and Dick Guatier. I’m doing a little Match Game set up in my basement a la Rupert Pupkin. Big Bertha was so buxom that her bra was made out of BLANK. Skinny Sam was so skinny that his wife used him as a BLANK. and so on….
@Chris: if you have IFC OnDemand, you can watch them at $8 a pop (or you can search for more nefarious means of obtaining the series).
@Michael: Yeah, I was over-excited. Your idea of television sounds like my early-adolescent experiences on the couch after school avoiding the inevitable.
Charles Nelson Reilly’s answer to question one: “trampolines.”
Richard Dawson’s answer to question two: “a swizzle stick.”
It must really suck to live in West Yorkshire. Still, you’ve got to give it up for the use of a crossbow. This is definitely a movie I don’t want to see.
Consistently gorgeous photography & production design, some great acting… and decreasing returns on the story.
Finally finished this, and I’m with you, Jeff–all that promise of something knottier, nastier, more deeply sociological kind of went missing in the last act. The show’s “mystery” and its noir template always seemed a bit overdetermined. After one episode, talking with Jeff I was confident about the killer’s identity. And (worse) every episode’s plotline falls all too neatly into some expected character and story arcs. But with some sharp editing, aforementioned gorgeous cinematography, and great acting… who cares?
I didn’t. Until episode 1983, which returned to the serial-killer turf which opened the series, and tied up loose ends. I actually thought 1980 was a lot grottier and more perversely vicious, but with a point–ye olde point, but a point nonetheless–about the pervasive misogyny ostensibly distilled in a figure like the Yorkshire ripper but really manifest everywhere, every man “an enemy” as some contemporary graffiti exclaims during the opening credits. But the sociological goes away in the last episode–it’s all sex and murder and guilt and (finally) a wee dram of redemption. Still, it’s got a fine performance by Mark Addy.
But overall it’s definitely worth seeing. Visually superior to but in all other respects a notch down from most of the great Prime Suspect series (and often Cracker, too).
It has been a pretty awful fucking summer for movies, indeed not a great year so far, but this trilogy is brilliant. There are flaws — the last part is a little too elegiac and ties things a little too neatly together — but over five hours it does a remarkable job of sustaining the mood and driving the narrative forward. I liked the formalism of each episode: each begins with an outsider (reporter, cop, lawyer) getting involved, seeking the truth and slowly, against their will, becoming obsessed with some angle of the overall sordid story.
I was less unhappy than Jeff and Mike that the core of the story turned on sexual perversion, and the web of lies and cover-ups that it generated, than on corrupt police and municipal politics. The power of the story is surely the scale of horror and personal tragedy that the police were prepared to countenance for profit and to protect themselves. It always needed to return to the kids, and the presence of BJ serving as narrator and conscience, weaving throughout the three films until finally becoming — like Hazel — “the one that got away” makes him the emotional core of the trilogy.
But more important is just the craft of these films and the actors that populate them. So many actors deliver pitch perfect performances — Sean Bean, David Morrissey, Paddy Considine, Robert Sheehan. The smokey bars, the council estates, the inside of the Karachi Club, the interiors are all beautifully filmed. Which is why the sunshine and brightness of the third film seems a bit discordant. But overall, there is not a lot to fault here. Who would have thought this would be my favorite movie of the summer?
You’re right on, in that last paragraph. And it *has* been an exceedingly shitty summer for movies. (I did adore Toy Story 3, but I haven’t even gotten past a mild temptation for the shite that’s opening “big” every week. Please Christopher Nolan, save us!)
My video store finally had a copy of RR’74 in stock this week. I’ve tried to limit what I read about it, other than hearing about how amazing it is.
And yeah, it is. It truly does not look like a television production, other than maybe a condensed season of The Wire transported back decades and a continent away. I’m anxious to pick up the next segment today, though after the scorched earth ending on ’74, I wonder how much of the story can really move forward. As a stand alone movie, it really is quite excellent. Alan J. Pakula would have been proud.
I can’t remember the last time I was so happy that a character at the end of a movie grab a gun and deals out punishment to all deserving around him with little fanfare or discussion.