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Movie Review
Damaged Men, Shifting Loyalties
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By A.O. Scott
- Aug. 26, 2014
The title of “Starred Up,” David Mackenzie’s brutal and boisterous new prison drama, refers to the status of its main character, Eric. Though he is legally still under age, Eric, played with method actor inwardness and movie star magnetism by Jack O’Connell, has been promoted to adult status in the British penal system. It’s not hard to see why. Brawny and athletic, he looks less like a child than like a young bull, and his capacity for violence unnerves even some of the hardened older criminals in whose midst he finds himself.
One of them is his father, Neville (Ben Mendelsohn), a powerful inmate with a network of prisoners and guards at his beck and call. Eric and Neville’s relationship, full of rage, suspicion, shaky loyalty and blocked tenderness, is the dramatic heart of the movie, but Mr. Mackenzie (whose previous films include “Hallam Foe,” “Young Adam” and “Tonight You’re Mine”) is not one for sentimental tales of reconciliation.
“Starred Up,” based partly on the screenwriter Jonathan Asser’s experiences as a prison volunteer, puts the setting in front of the characters and the plot. Though it is, finally, an affecting story of two damaged men bound by blood and something like love (and also a thrillerish catalog of double crosses and shifting allegiances), it is, above all, a study in the patterns of chaos that govern penitentiary life.
The usual language of realism doesn’t quite apply to Mr. Mackenzie’s methods, which aim for visceral, nerve-jangling authenticity. He and the cinematographer, Michael McDonough, let the camera run through the cellblock, a noisy, unbearably tense place where peace consists of the temporary absence of bloodshed.
The feeling induced in the audience is something close to panic, a perfectly appropriate response and exactly the one that Eric can’t permit himself to show. Stripping down and soaping himself up for a battle in his cell that he knows he won’t win, he seems caught between pleasure and terror. He expects to be hurt and also to prove that he is someone not to be messed with. But at the same time, and throughout the film, you catch a flicker of sensitivity in his eyes and a hint behind his impassive features of the confused child he may still be.
Eric and Neville sometimes meet in group sessions organized by Oliver (Rupert Friend), a therapist whose attempts to help the inmates work out their issues with words rather than fists are looked on by the prison governors with condescending tolerance or contempt, depending on how many fights they have been called in to break up lately.
Oliver, tough but compassionate, his idealism always on the brink of collapsing, represents another of the clichés that “Starred Up” flirts with and rejects. This could easily have been the story of a noble healer — a variation on the heroic big-city teachers so beloved at various points in Hollywood history — reaching out to a hard case. And, in retrospect, maybe it is that, but in the moment, the film is far too raw and scary to be reduced to such formulas.
Much of the credit for that goes to Mr. O’Connell and Mr. Mendelsohn, whose performances unfold in a counterpoint of brute force and deep craft. Mr. Mendelsohn, an Australian character actor with a long record of memorable performances (not always in memorable movies), plays Neville as a fox whose viciousness is masked by a calm, almost philosophical slyness. Mr. O’Connell, like Eric himself, seems blunt and guileless, turning his inchoate feelings into terrifying action.
“Starred Up” is not a film that uses prison to explore political or social problems, except insofar as incarceration is itself such a problem. It does not operate in the mode of “In the Name of the Father” or “The Green Mile” or even “Oz,” the American premium-cable penitentiary soap opera. It most resembles “A Prophet,” Jacques Audiard’s 2010 tour de force about power relations and male behavior in confinement.
Like that movie, this one turns the complicated dynamic between a young prisoner and his problematic mentor into a ferocious psychodrama that locks you in and refuses to let you go.
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