By Mike Wilmington Wilmington@moviecitynews.com
Wilmington on DVDs: Shallow Grave
PICK OF THE WEEK: Classic
SHALLOW GRAVE (Also Blu-ray) (Three and a Half Stars)
Scotland/Great Britain: Danny Boyle, 1994 (Criterion Collection)
Like Joel and Ethan Coen’s classic Texas noir Blood Simple, Danny Boyle’s Shallow Grave is a smart, stylish, dark little comedy of murder and money. It‘s a top-chop neo-noir, a straight-on view of an off-kilter society, an Edinburgh rogue’s and semi-rogue’s gallery, with eerily disturbing portraits of people we don’t like all that much (or shouldn’t, but maybe do anyway), but who fascinate and amuse us with their colorful, mad, oddly believable personalities — and also by the sheer comic ineptitude with which they let themselves be pulled into a vortex of danger and evil.
Shallow Grave was director Boyle’s first feature, and it was also a major British audience and critical/festival hit of 1994, whose prizes included the British Film Academy’s Best Picture award. The film also introduced much of the British and international audiences to writer John Hodge, producer Andrew Macdonald, cinematographer Brian Tufano and to three young soon-to-be-famous leads, Kerry Fox, Christopher Eccleston and the magnetically boyish smirker Ewan McGregor.
They play three young professionals who live together in a large, posh apartment in Edinburgh’s toney New Town. Alex Law (played by McGregor) is a bright yellow tabloid journalist and a smart-ass. David Stevens (Eccleston) is a fair, cadaverous-looking, more straight-arrow accountant, who starts off the story, Billy Wilderishly and Sunset Blvd.-ishly, from the morgue. Juliet Miller (Fox) is a doctor, a sexy, foxy smarty pants, and also the woman the other two obviously adore — though none of them, apparently, are sleeping together. Yet.
The apartment has another bedroom which the roommates want to rent out, and so they subject a series of prospective tenants (including a nice old lady played by McGregor’s real-life mother) to a series of sadistic cross-examinations, after which they invariably nix them and laugh hysterically as their humiliated victims leave. The threesome’s behavior is obnoxiously cruel (Hodge’s script was at one point called “Cruel”), but they do have the merit of being funny and of having good timing, like the movie itself. They also laugh at each other’s jokes, one of the first rules of friendship.
The one potential roommate whom the threesome do seem to like is a close-mouthed chap named Hugo (Keith Allen), who is suave and cold and somewhat sleazy-looking, and who looks as if he doesn‘t laugh at anybody‘s jokes. When they give Hugo the room, he promptly moves in, takes an overdose of drugs and kicks the bucket. And when they go over Hugo’s effects, before reporting his demise, they discover a suitcase stuffed with cash.
This seems a typical set-up for Boyle, whose propensity for cautionry break-the-bank films might well earn him the nickname “Get Rick Quick” Danny Boyle. But here’s where I stop the synopsis. Believe me, you don’t want me to go any further, and not out of skittishness or fear, but because you likely and sensibly don’t want to miss the deliciously macabre surprises and ingenious suspense set-pieces Boyle and Hodge keep detonating throughout the movie. Also, I don’t really believe everyone really heeds those little SPOILER ALERT messages we helpfully supply in cases like this, any more than I believe nobody ever skipped to the end of an Agatha Christie murder mystery. And I don’t want to offer an occasion for temptation, like Hugo’s suitcase.
I will tell you though, hopefully without spoiling anything, that there is a grave in this movie, as well as some other finely written and very well-acted characters — including a talkative cop called McCall played by the estimable Ken Stott (of Mike Hodges’ I’ll sleep when I’m dead), and his quiet fellow cop Mitchell (played by Grave’s screenwriter Hodge), and an exceptionally vicious killer played by the excellent actor-director Peter Mullan (of Ken Loach’s My Name is Joe).
Then there’s the spot-on lead trio: David, Juliet and Smart Alex. They may behave sadistically at times, but they aren’t congenitally nasty. They’re something more like an ’80s middle class version of Evelyn Waugh’s ‘20s Bright Young Things: Thatcher-era Yuppies and Upward Mobes, lacking in empathy, and taking nothing very seriously, until it comes crashing down on them and others. The three don’t really have a moral compass yet, except for David, and his compass, we sense, may get screwed around or smashed.
McGregor, Fox and Eccleston play these three near-perfectly, with a fine mix of comic buoyancy and a more serious, blacker edge, with just enough empathy to keep us absorbed in their fates, and just enough objectivity to let us see when they’re slipping off the rails.
It’s also easy maybe to see why it was McGregor who became the biggest star of the three — even though Eccleston was about to play Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure in Michael Winterbottom’s 1996 film Jude, while Kerry Fox had already given an absolutely wonderful performance as New Zealand writer Janet Frame in Jane Campion’s 1990 An Angel At My Table. The camera likes them all, but it likes McGregor (and his smirk) perhaps a little more.
The acting throughout is admirable and economical, and so are the writing and directing and the cinema technique. They’re all what we want from a sharp-witted, snazzy British thriller –a posh noir worthy of Wilder, worthy of the Coen Brothers, worthy of Clouzot, worthy even of Hitchcock. (One of Shallow Grave‘s many prizes, in fact, was the Golden Hitchcock of the British Dinard Film Festival.) Worthy of Danny Boyle, in fact. Boyle at his best.
They’re all at their best, or at their near best, here, And Boyle, Hodge, Macdonald, Tufano, and McGregor all reunited two years later for an even darker, funnier and more spectacular film: the 1996 Edinburgh lower-depths heroin chronicle Trainspotting, which received what I recall as a 30-minute standing ovation at its Cannes Film Festival premiere.
No one probably ever gave Shallow Grave that long an ovation, despite all its awards. But it’s the kind of movie that puts you on the hook anyway, that drives ruthlessly to the end and stays in your mind long afterwards. And, along the way, despite the fact that the film rarely strays from that apartment, it exposes and tells us quite a lot about the sometimes dark and selfish and heedless world we live in. Or, as “Get Rick Quick” Danny Boyle might say: the morgue’s-eye world, just below the money, just above the grave.
Extras: Commentaries by Danny Boyle, John Hodge and Andrew Macdonald; Interviews with Christopher Eccleston, Kerry Fox and Ewan McGregor; Kevin Macdonald’s 1993 Digging Your Own Grave, a “making of” documentary; Andrew and Kevin Macdonald’s video diary of shopping around the Shallow Grave project at the 1992 Edinburgh Film Festival; Trailer for Shallow Grave; Teaser for Trainspotting; Booklet with excellent Philip Kemp essay.
