Filth

The trailer for Filth makes it seem like it's going to be light-hearted, and while there are some funny moments, it's actually the most disturbingly depressing movie I've seen since Requiem for a Dream. James McAvoy delivers an impressive performance, but it's still tough to watch.

The trailer for Filth was pretty misleading. It makes it seem like it's going to be a funny movie about a guy who does some outrageous things, but there seems like there's a potential for him to change, which was what piqued my interest. It's actually about a severely mentally ill guy having a complete breakdown, and it's the most depressing movie I've seen since Requiem for a Dream. Movies like this should have with a disclaimer.

I love James McAvoy, but Filth was rough to watch even with him as the lead. He really does bring a lot to the character, though. He always pulls you in no matter what the role is, but in good performances like this (it reminds me of Heath Ledger as The Joker), it's always the small nuances, the facial expressions and mannerisms; it's not the over-the-top emotional stuff that makes the performance noteworthy.

I knew from the start I'd have to have subtitles on, and I was right. The accents and colloquialisms were Scottish, and they might as well have been speaking Spanish for all I could pick out on my own, which meant I had to read the movie about as much as I watched it. I probably missed out on some things, and I definitely didn't get to watch as much as I wanted to. Everything was shot super close-up; it felt really claustrophobic, and it didn't help that the subtitles were taking up a good portion of the screen.

It's such a harsh movie. It just pounds you with non-stop horribleness. The few scenes with the doctor were actually a relief; the camera even pulled back and you could see the whole room for once. The movie started out with some funny bits, but Bruce quickly started doing things that were just terrible; I couldn't get behind him in that at all, and I felt bad for his victims. And then he started breaking down and crying and feeling miserable and out of control and I felt bad for him.

 

They kept dangling the hope carrot in front of the audience; I thought maybe Drummond could get him some help, but she didn't. I thought maybe the lady with the son would let him hang out with her, and she didn't. Although, I'm sure that wouldn't have helped him anyway, but at least he could've had some kind of contact with someone. Even after everyone found out he was dressing up like his wife, I kept thinking, "there's a lot of time left in the movie, there's still time for them to fix it and make things turn out all right." I guess it might not have been very realistic if they had, but I'd rather have unrealistic than depressing.

I thought it was his wife who had killed the Japanese guy, and for about a third of the movie I was thinking, "I don't think I like this, but at least we have the thread of his wife killing that guy; that was interesting, I wonder what's going on with her?" It was a pretty crazy twist that Bruce was actually dressing up like her. It put a new spin on why he didn't really want to solve that case, since he was a witness and he wouldn't want that to come out.

I did notice something "off" about the scenes with his wife in them, and I noticed she looked normal in the home video. That was such a sad scene, when he was crying even on the phone with Bunty (and what weird name that is). I knew Bunty from somewhere, and I couldn't place her; it turns out she was on an episode of Dr. Who. Her hair was pretty crazy, and so was her house. That was a strange direction to go in. But after a while I was thinking, "Where is his family? Are they dead?" I didn't think he could pull off not telling anyone at the station if they were dead, though.

It was so sad at the end when he was falling apart and all these women kept throwing themselves at him and he didn't even want to have sex with them but he wound up doing it anyway. Nobody cared about him or was paying attention to what was really going on with him. I guess you could say he got what he deserved after being so manipulative, but all of that was just trying to escape from how he really felt.

The music was good, and a lot of the scenes had great composition. Even the scene at the beginning when his wife kneels down next to the Japanese guy, it's a great shot, and so is the one where Bruce is coming down the hall in the apartment of the stoat-the-baw guy. Some of the shots were a little Kubrick-y, and the gang beating up the Japanese guy and the classical music they used sometimes reminded me of Clockwork Orange, too. I like how they say "Polis" in Scotland. It's so close to "police" without actually being "police."

I didn't understand what was going on when he was masturbating and he called Bunty for the first time; it was super confusing. But later I obviously figured out who Bunty was, and found out that he didn't like black guys because his wife is with one now. That explains the comment he made about white women being crazy to date black guys, too, although the author of the book said that Bruce just is racist, misogynistic, a bigot, and everything else. Some pretty bad stuff must have gone down with his family, based on how quickly the new guy got them out of there. It was super sad that he didn't even remember why his family left him.

The scenes where he was chastising people for expressing things he actually felt were pretty funny, like in the car with that one cop over the young girl, and in the office with his boss where he was like, "your words; you said that, not me." There were lots of funny scenes really, if you could get past feeling bad for people. The best line was when Bruce said, "I never thought I'd see the day when I left a knocking shop with more spunk than I came in with." I liked his double-handed way of flipping people off, like with the kid and his boss. It seemed weird to me that a kid who's flipping off a cop would be crying over a balloon, though, and it didn't ring true at all that that other guy would start making out with Bruce in the deserted building.

I couldn't figure out why they kept calling him "Robbo" until like halfway through the commentary - Bruce Robinson. I guess I had a bit of a hard time keeping names straight in general. I liked that people kept calling him on being "cruel." It didn't change him, but at least they weren't just taking it. It was terrible when we found out what originally screwed him up so much, and that the title of the movie comes from his father calling him filth, although apparently they also call police "the filth" in the UK, so it has that double meaning.