23 April, 2006
By Sara Brady.Source: PREMIERE.COM
Kirk’s film is a masterfully gloomy dirge, a Northern Irish neo-western that approximates High Noon if Gary Cooper had been a rigid cleric. Which is not only possible in one film, but plausible as well.
The film opens with young Gabriel Hunter, played as an adult by Matthew MacFadyen (Pride & Prejudice), learning from his father and his minister that he’s to be sent away to seminary. Outside the church, his brother Jim gets into a scuffle with another kid. Skip forward about twenty years and Jim (Daniel Mays) is eking out a very muddy existence with his pregnant wife Caroline (Eva Birthistle) when Gabriel returns to take over the church. Gabriel’s battle to reform the town is a complicated one, as things tend to be in Northern Ireland; through the conflicts of subsistence, piety, and loyalty to God or family, Kirk and screenwriter Daragh Carville examine the ways religion and violence tend to intersect. Kirk says he was partly inspired by the combination of the two not just in his home country but in the American South, and Carville drew inspiration from Johnny Cash and Gram Parsons’s outlaw country.
The actors, including Gerard McSorley as the Hunter patriarch, are uniformly impressive, enacting what amounts to a morality play that leaves the audience with more questions than answers. It’s not a message movie, thank God, because those tend to be talky punishments, but you certainly end up pondering thorny issues like the validity of righteousness if people are starving, or wondering at the stringent application of this particularly punitive strain of Christianity that the characters cling to. The Protestant Irish experience is one that has gotten little cinematic treatment, at least on this side of the Atlantic, and in this particular way of life Middletown is a pioneer. It would be wrong to call this an enjoyable film, because the experience is visceral and even brutal at times, but it’s a compelling one. I literally couldn’t look away.
Driving Lessons, now, that’s a lovely, sweet little movie that’s a fresh sort of palate cleanser after the fire and blood that brings Middletown to its furious climax. Jeremy Brock, who wrote Mrs. Brown and Charlotte Gray, here makes his first film about an Anglican pastor’s family, mainly his son, played by Rupert Grint of the Harry Potter films. Laura Linney, playing the preacher’s wife as one of those very involved women particular to the suburbs who run everything, is as precise and effective as ever, although she sounds slightly absurd with a prim London accent.
Grint’s Ben is an introverted, poetry-writing (in movie shorthand, never good for the social life) kid who colossally fails his driving test in the first scene. He takes a job as an assistant to a former stage actress, Evie Walton (Julie Walters), who proceeds to upend his shuttered and thoroughly boring life. It’s a meaty, absurd role for Walters, and she throws everything she has into it. Now would be the time to cluck about how rare such roles are for actresses of a certain age, but that would really diminish Walters’s achievement. It isn’t just that the role is eccentric and gives Walters plenty of opportunity to be grandly weird; she gives a wide-ranging and gorgeously watchable performance.
Grint, too, is coming into the potential he showed in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Not just a goggle-eyed cutup, he has a subdued humor and a riotous sense of comic timing. Films we see in the U.S. tend to use characters’ religion as shorthand for fanatic, serial killer, or virginal dullard, which isn’t the case with Driving Lessons. Ben and his family come across as really very normal people who aren’t defined by their denomination. That shouldn’t be as surprising and rare as it is, and for its casualness, it’s effective.
