While the Pollocks return to their hellish high-rise, and the boys regale their depressed parents with punk rock, Barbara and John get ready for bed and represent two sides of ’80s Toryism. John is Thatcherite self-interest, toadying to his boss and urging that his wife’s nephews should stand on their own two feet. But Barbara is a One Nation Tory . . . she believes that they – or at least, she – can fix the broken members of her family with benign condescension. Barbara is lonely, makes mistakes, talks down to people, competes with her sister. But she is the adult heroine of this piece. She believes that things can be changed for the better. She means well, and she means it.
But most of Meantime is taken up with scenes of council estate life for the young unwashed and unwanted. Dole queues and their attendant humiliations. Sticky-floored pubs and weak lager. Piss-stinking lifts and bleak launderettes. And a skinhead mate called Coxy who Gary Oldman gets so brilliantly right that special Channel 4 Services To Yoof Oscars should have been invented in his honour.
Unlike Made In Britain’s Trevor, Coxy is an idiot. Most skinheads were. They made friendships through bullying. They adopted racist attitudes because that’s what people who wore lace-up boots and those hideous ballpoint pen tattoos did. They were never comfortable until someone else was tense, but when anyone finally stepped up to them, and they had no back-up, they were pathetic cowards. They could be a laugh sometimes, because of their energy and mischief. They could relieve your boredom. But if they sucked you in they would immediately make you regret it, mood-swinging, under influence of cider or solvent abuse, towards random violence at the flick of a mysterious mental switch. They always had an abusive father and a pathetic mother, and you tried to pity them. But their answer always seemed to be to play that scenario out again and again, but with themselves in the Daddy role, and they could hone in on someone weaker and needier than them with an unerring eye for the possibility of wielding arbitrary power. They weren’t like Trevor, in the end, because Trevor had purpose, even if that purpose was sheer nihilism. They just existed to make someone feel worse than themselves, and made you wonder how you had become masochistic enough to let them into your life.
Gary Oldman, as the gobbing, flobbing, belching and squelching Coxy, is every one of those lost and worthless boys.
Oldman hits his peak in a lift. Coxy and Colin are going to visit Hayley in her high-rise flat, and enter a lift with a young Jamaican man pushing a pram. Coxy begins to goad the man with crap racist jokes. Eventually, when he ventures the word ‘coon’, he gets the violent reaction we thought he wanted. But . . . he’s used to people backing down, because of the haircut, the boots, the uniform. This man has called his bluff. Oldman’s face . . . the terror, the shock, the way that he visibly regresses from young man to small boy, is one of the finest pieces of dialogue-free reaction you’ll ever see. Even as you cheer the racist being put in his place, you see, in Oldman’s eyes, a full picture of the violence that he’s endured and that he is attempting to ape. No back-story needed. Truly stunning. Oh . . . and you should keep an eye on the black guy’s pram, too. It isn’t just a prop.
Eventually, among the short vignettes about bitching teens and gambling mums, Special Brew and staring at the telly, launderettes and unwanted pregnancies, and jumpers and cardigans so spectacularly ugly that times have come full circle and they’re now highly sought-after fashion items on the mean streets of nearby Shoreditch, a story emerges through the fug of mean times.
Colin has a crush on Hayley, played by beautiful, baleful Tilly Vosburgh, (a sort of female James Bolam whose I-hit-bottom-then-things-got-worse demeanour has lit up British TV for years without ever getting the woman her due), but Hayley has an unfortunate, sado-masochistic thing for the bullying Coxy. Meanwhile, Barbara tries to provide employment for Colin by offering him money to paint her and John’s semi-detached palace in leafy Chigwell, an attempt at patronage that the anarchistic Mark can’t leave unpunished because, despite apparently living to humiliate his damaged brother, Colin is, in truth, the only thing he loves. But Mark and Barbara have an intellectual connection, and he, and we, finally see the full horror of her bored suburban life. And everything comes down, in the end, not to an epiphany, nor money from the sky, nor even coming of age and escape from these two different but connected prisons. But one bespectacled, abused boy screaming the words, ‘Shut Up!’ In a world where absolutely no one is capable of making themselves understood, the only freedom is the freedom to scream. And shave your head, regret it, and remind the audience that just a few months earlier you were playing the hardest skinhead on Earth.
Leigh’s genius lies in his ability to see the natural comedy in the bleakest scenario. At one point, four people who hate each other all trying to use the one toilet in a tiny corridor in a hideous flat becomes a beautifully choreographed parody of bawdy French farce – you know, someone heads out of a door and just misses someone coming out of another door, that sort of thing. You’re watching lives that have no hope of improvement, but you’re too busy chortling and vibing off the brilliant acting to feel despondent. Daniels and Roth are especially extraordinary, completely subverting their charismatic rebel breakthrough roles in Quadrophenia (see here) and Made In Britain (see here). Roth’s walk here – a comic, fall-forward stagger – is as powerful and bold a statement as Trevor’s malevolent wide-boy swagger.
You come out of Leigh’s best work – Abigail’s Party, Nuts In May, Life Is Sweet, Secrets And Lies – feeling strangely uplifted by grim truths and cramped lives, as if pessimism can be as inspiring as optimism, as long as you adopt that mustn’t-grumble, chin-up, never-say-die spirit, and laugh at yourself. A surreal scene in the Pollock flat defines the freewheeling spirit.
Barbara has come round to make her offer to Colin but is interrupted by the sudden arrival of a stranger. He’s a good-looking, youngish guy with a college scarf and kind eyes, who says ‘Hi’ in that submerged posh, Hush Puppie way that says, ‘Hello. I’m a hippy elitist. I’m now going to control your life and make you grateful for it.’ Richard Branson and Tony Blair took this voice all the way to the top.
Bizarrely, he’s the bloke the council have sent round to sort out the flat’s broken window. Obviously, he’s not going to actually fix the window. But he’s not going to just do the paperwork either. He’s a Zen council worker.
He crouches in the lounge because he doesn’t like chairs. He flirts with Barbara and says things like, ‘We’re all old. We’re all young. Yeah?’ He gets into an argument with her about whether economics is money, or power, or both, and seems hugely reluctant to leave. And then, when he’s resigned himself to having to concentrate on his job and move on, he treats the assembled to a tortured analogy about single grains of sand eventually becoming anthills. Andrew Dickson’s wonderful, dreamy piano motif plays, the Pollocks look bewildered, and I remember why I didn’t become a social worker. He finally leaves, and Colin stares at his mother and asks, ‘Have we got ants?’ Gotta have a punchline.
No one laughs at their own uselessness quite as heartily as The British. I wonder if that’s what’s happened to the teen gangs who held up England for trainers and cellphones in August 2011. They’ve forgotten how to laugh at failure.
THE OUTSIDERS
1983
Starring: C. Thomas Howell, Ralph Macchio, Diane Lane, Matt Dillon, Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, Tom Cruise, Glenn Withrow, Leif Garrett, Tom Waits
Dir.: Francis Ford Coppola
Plot: The Brat Pack as the world’s prettiest teen gang.
Key line: ‘Stay gold, Ponyboy. Stay gold.’
At the time, what immediately impressed about going to see The Outsiders was that it was a Francis Coppola movie. Now, it’s hard not to be staggered by the cast. The greatest triumphs of Cruise, Swayze, Lane, Dillon, Lowe, Estevez et al. were largely ahead of them. But so many famous faces in one young ensemble cast pays quite some tribute to Coppola’s star-spotting abilities. The fact that The Outsiders was made before anyone e
ven coined the The Brat Pack phrase yet ranks high among the best work of any of its stars says a lot for his abilities as an actors’ director, too.
The movie exists because of a unique teen fantasy wish-fulfilment. A group of students from the Lone Star Elementary School in Fresno, California wrote to Coppola urging him to make a film of their favourite book. S.E. Hinton’s 1967 novel The Outsiders is the first of five extraordinary coming-of-age tales the female author based in her hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Coppola read it and fell so heavily in love with its poetic view of class-based teen gang warfare that he shot adaptations of both The Outsiders and Hinton’s 1975 novel Rumble Fish (see here) on location in Tulsa over a few feverish months in 1982. But even though The Outsiders was and continues to be a huge bestseller in print, and both films were acclaimed, they flopped commercially, hastening the collapse of Coppola’s Zoetrope production company and ending Coppola’s imperial phase that was launched by The Godfather.
Why The Outsiders fared even less well than Rumble Fish at the box office remains a mystery. It’s a beautiful piece of magical realism that takes our romantic attachment to teen gangs full of sexy, misunderstood boys to its operatic conclusion. But it and Rumble Fish are auteur films, full of the self-indulgent visual and sonic flourishes that that implies, at a time when Coppola’s old friends and protégés Steven Spielberg and George Lucas had re-introduced the world to old-fashioned, bombastic cinematic storytelling. Coppola’s undervalued twins were, indeed, outsiders.
Set in a 1960s that still looks like the 1950s, the story concerns the war between working-class gang The Greasers from the northern and wrong side of the tracks, and their preppy rivals The Socs (pronounced ‘soashes’, as in short for ‘socials’) from the posh southside. Imagine National Lampoon’s Animal House with evocative lighting and without the zit and tit gags.
Ponyboy Curtis (Howell) and Johnny Cade (Macchio) are junior Greasers, sensitive kids following somewhat reluctantly in the footsteps of Ponyboy’s older brothers Darry (Swayze) and Soda (Lowe), and obnoxious hard nut Dallas ‘Dally’ Winston (Dillon). Ponyboy’s parents are dead and Darry is now Daddy of the house, which makes him the authority figure to be rebelled against. Darry and Sodapop aside, the boys do what movie boys of that era do: hang around, go to the drive-in and the soda bar, hassle small children and girls, wear t-shirts and jeans and leather jackets and grease on their hair and fags behind their ears in order to look cool and mean.
But juvenile delinquency is plumb outta hand in old Tulsa. Johnny’s paranoid because a Soc recently slashed his face with a knife, and everywhere you go some group of kids are shoving some poor loner or weedy-looking boy around, or threatening to. So when rich kid Bob Sheldon (Garrett) catches Ponyboy, Johnny and Two-Bit (Estevez) walking his girl Cherry (Lane) home from the Beach Blanket Bingo/Muscle Beach Party double-bill, Greaser-Soc tensions are ratcheted up a notch or twenty.
Eventually Ponyboy is set upon by Socs and poor, introverted Johnny stabs Bob and kills him. Johnny and Ponyboy head out on the lam, holing up in an abandoned church, homoerotically bonding over bleaching Ponyboy’s hair blonde, Gone With The Wind in novel form and Robert Frost poetry. But, while out grabbing a meal with Dally and talking about turning themselves in, a party of school children invade the church and accidentally start a fire. Our three heroes rescue the kids but Johnny suffers severe burns and a broken back.
Despite his injuries and heroism, Johnny is still charged with manslaughter for the killing of Bob. While Johnny lies in hospital, The Greasers and The Socs have a huge rumble which is so balletic, sweaty and rain-soaked it resembles some kind of mud-wrestling soft-porn movie for female Swayze and Cruise fans. The Greasers win, but, by now, even successful violence has been exposed as an exercise in futility.
Johnny dies a saintly death. Dally goes mental and gets shot after robbing a shop. And the movie ends it where it begins: with Johnny writing a school essay about the whole tragic melodrama.
A number of things make The Outsiders a magical movie experience. One major one is Coppola’s immersion in Americana and rock ’n’ roll myth. The tale is played out to a soundtrack of chirping crickets and lonesome train whistles and the sound of Them’s 1964 hit ‘Gloria’ (yep, I know Van Morrison’s Irish. But this record is an outsider’s view of what being young and American is, and is therefore more American than something American, and absolutely perfect for this movie).
Coppola’s prodigiously talented cast look like the embodiment of doomed American youth, captured so poignantly and prettily that, unlike the characters in American Graffiti (see here), you can’t imagine them ever growing old. The boys’ faces are haunted and hunted, but gorgeously. It isn’t the pain in the story that moves you. It’s the aesthetic qualities of how that pain is made to look.
The whole movie glows and flickers, very much like the deep night would when illuminated by movie lighting. Perhaps the major reason for the film’s failure – along with that of Rumble Fish and Coppola’s love letter to Hollywood romance One From The Heart – is that The Outsider is a movie about movies. Coppola makes no attempt to make things feel ‘real’; instead, The Outsiders is a stylised amalgam of and tribute to every angst-ridden American teen film we’ve already covered, and especially West Side Story, Rebel Without A Cause, The Wild One, Blackboard Jungle, The Last Picture Show, American Graffiti and The Warriors. It’s the first meta-teen movie. And, as such, it was just too much of an art film to attract an actual audience of real ’80s teens and compete with the likes of Back To The Future and A Nightmare On Elm Street. Those who saw it were adult film buffs. In that sense, the movie it and Rumble Fish are closest to – in spirit and commercial fate – is 1981’s The Loveless (see Popcorn), Kathryn Bigelow’s surreal and homoerotic homage to biker movies, which also got some critics excited but died a box office death.
Incidentally, if you watch the film and wonder how Stevie Wonder could have written a theme song as awful as ‘Stay Gold’, look at the credits and you’ll notice that Wonder wrote only the lyrics. The music, like the movie’s overwrought score, was written by Coppola’s brother Carmine. You’ve got to hand it to old fat Frank: he’s a man who puts family loyalty way beyond the health of his films. You’ve seen The Godfather 3, right?
RUMBLE FISH
1983
Starring: Matt Dillon, Mickey Rourke, Nicolas Cage, Diane Lane, Vincent Spano, Chris Penn, Dennis Hopper, William Smith, Laurence Fishburne
Dir.: Francis Ford Coppola
Plot: A nerd’s love-letter to cinematic juvenile delinquency.
Key line: ‘If they can get The Motorcycle Boy, they can get anyone.’
Francis Ford Coppola’s second S.E. Hinton adaptation (see The Outsiders, here) is a guilty pleasure. It is, in many ways, a laughable movie, and people laughed at it. It cost $10 million to make, and only took $2 million at the box office. It pretty much killed off Coppola’s Zoetrope production company. It was booed when first shown at the New York Film Festival. Its visual overload is in direct relation to its lack of genuine emotion.
It’s a film packed with directorial gimmicks: high contrast chiaroscuro monochrome; sudden gratuitous deep focus; seasick Steadicam; shadows and light plucked from Orson Welles, German expressionist silent cinema, John Ford, film noir, French new wave and Bogdanovitch’s The Last Picture Show (see here); constant rock show smoke that looks like it blew over from the set of The Warriors (see here); shots of land and skyscapes composed of Koyaanisqatsi-style time-lapse photography, charting the passage of clouds or the journey of the sun in gorgeous but irrelevant seconds. Its most famous visual conceit? The Siamese Fighting Fish – the ‘Rumble Fish’ of the title – shot in lurid colour as they swim in a pet shop tank surrounded by nothing but black and white. Add to this, the final, utterly confounding element . . . the ersatz biker soundtrack of rock ’n’ roll hits that the entire movie screams to dance to, replaced by a modern, art rock-jazz-reggae soundtrack of drums, bass and pianos by Stewart Copeland of The Police
, often mixed so loud that it obscures the conversation of the characters.
There is no way to be neutral about all this. You either fall helplessly in love with the bravura visual aesthetic and sheer inappropriateness of everything – or you write it off, within minutes, as one of the most soullessly pretentious vanity projects that a major director has ever indulged himself with.
And, as Rumble Fish is here, I guess you know which side I’m on. There are a few reasons, but only one really good reason. And that reason would be Mickey Rourke.
Rourke’s Motorcycle Boy is one of the coolest ciphers ever put onscreen and asked to mumble incoherently. Rumble Fish is so much about his charisma that Coppola even places him completely out of time, visually, from the rest of the movie. While every other character in this Tulsa, Oklahoma-based melodrama dresses like ’60s kids who never got over the ’50s, Rourke’s spiky hair, ragged stubble, plaid shirt and tweed jacket with upturned collar is pure New York punk scene circa 1977.
He is also a Ninja, if Ninjas were obsessed with Marlon Brando. He beats up all-comers without getting a hair put of place while constantly making Zen-like pleas for peace. And he’s so skilled with a motorbike that, if he wants to beat someone up, he just skips off the hog and lets it hurtle into the intended victim, sending him somersaulting into the air.
Those who only know Rourke from his recent post-comeback movies will, I suspect, be genuinely shocked when they get the first Rumble Fish close-up of the loony New Yorker. You’ve only seen him as a monster in The Wrestler and Sin City, using the face rendered hideous by his bizarre boxing career and extreme plastic surgery as a way into Beauty And The Beast roles. But at 32 (he was playing a 21-year-old), he was stunningly handsome; the kind of laconic, lazily amused, gently androgynous face that you just want to look at, even when its barely doing anything. Coppola announces his arrival offscreen and then slams into a close-up . . . and you got, at the time, some idea of what it must have felt like to be young and to see Presley, Brando, Dean or Montgomery Clift for the first time in the 1950s . . . to look at a boy who looks like The Future.
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