One of the worst people I ever knew was an old boss. From his first day, he targeted me and the only other male staff member. "Women just work better," he proudly declared, and it didn't take very long to become clear that he was trying to get rid of us. I had a pretty strong relationship with some of my female co-workers, and he saw that as a threat. He spent the next year playing mind games with all of us, to lengths that even in retrospect seem outrageous. Eventually, I screwed up and he jumped at the opportunity to get rid of me. About a month later, he was fired. My sudden disappearance from the roster caused management to come down and do some investigating. Turns out he'd been stealing money and fudging the numbers. Badly. In the months that followed, little bits and pieces of information started to leak out about what sort of a person he really was. We used to go into the back room of a night time to find things in different places, and often the office would smell like it had been lived in, which caused us to joke that maybe he was living there. He was; the share house he was staying in kicked him out for playing the same mind games he did with us. He also spent a week bragging about having a hot new car, which we all knew was a lie. When the owner came down for a meeting, he suggested this guy go and get some food with his flash ride. We could see him sprinting away from the back room to the pizza shop. He was so full of bravado and confidence that you would almost believe him to be as powerful and persuasive as he portrayed, if it weren't for always getting a glimpse at the other side of the coin. My point is, I've often wondered what motivates a person like that; what sort of trauma or event triggered them into becoming the person that they are. Filth has a go at answering such a pondering. Its conclusion? Nothing that hasn't happened to any other miserable cunt.
Within the first ten minutes of Filth, Bruce Robertson (James McAvoy) manages to be racist, misogynistic and homophobic on multiple occasions, sometimes within the same sentence. Even more impressive, he manages to simultaneously exude impossible charm and charisma. He's a detective working in Edinburgh, and word around the office is a promotion is coming up. He sees this as a great opportunity to keep his wife happy, and begins planning and executing schemes to ensure his co-workers couldn't possibly be considered, something he refers to as "The Games." For instance, his closest friend at the cop shop, the mild-mannered Bladesey (Eddie Marsan), finds his patience and masculinity put to the test as his wife continues to be harassed with very sexual prank phone calls that she herself is engaging in too. Guess who's making them? It's all part of "The Games", including Bruce's subsequent framing of Bladesey for the calls. On top of all this, he's working on solving the murder of a young Japanese girl, a case that gets all the more difficult as his drug abuse, bipolar disorder and general mental stability begin to steadily and increasingly spiral out of control. Does he eventually learn from his all-encompassing destructive tendencies, acknowledge his rampant, glorifying dishonesty and make, if not completely, then at least the first steps towards being a somewhat decent human being? Nope, he hangs himself. Credits.
Seeing Filth in a sold-out theatre was an interesting experience, because I was able to witness the trick it pulls on its audience on a large scale. Initially, as I've already mentioned, Bruce Robertson is a disgusting human being, but damn it all if he isn't smooth about it. The audience (myself included) laughed uproariously as he freely and wittily disparaged anyone who had the misfortune of being in his proximity and not a straight white male. At the office Christmas party, he sees his co-worker, Ray Lennox (Jamie Bell) finally getting in close with his crush. Utilising his prior knowledge that Ray's not the most well-endowed fellow, he suggests a party game in which they all photocopy their assets in private and get the female staff to guess which belongs to whom. Ensuring that he doesn't give up a chance to glorify himself while humiliating someone else, he goes ahead and hits the enlarge button on his own not-so-impressive hang dang. At another point in the film, he's masturbating to porn on his flat-screen, until the camera pulls out and he realises the woman is with a black man, prompting him to shout "FUCK OFF" and change the channel to a children's television show. This gets him going again, and he gives Bladesey's wife a ring to help him rub one out. As the film's title suggests, this is low-down and disgusting, but it's presented with an energy and wit that somehow makes it accessible. Because right now, all we're seeing is this man with a winning grin who can do anything to anyone, and he's letting us in on the joke. It's funny, until it isn't. Later in the film, Bruce is watching home movies of his wife and child. The weight of his emotions begin to overwhelm and he breaks down, sobbing. But rather than allow himself to have a genuine moment of humanity, he desperately fumbles for the phone so he can call Bladesey's wife again. It's the same situation, with similar lines and the same cheeky smile, but now we've seen the man behind the curtain. As Bruce comes, with tears, snot and spit streaming down his face, a voice in his ear begging him to fuck her and a TV displaying a still frame of his once-happy wife in their kitchen, it's not so funny anymore.
There's a very long segment in Filth where Bruce really starts circling the drain. He erratically shifts from one encounter to the next, inhaling more drugs and medication wherever possible and rapidly becoming more and more psychologically unhinged. He regularly has hallucinatory flashes where the people in front of him resemble the animal he most closely identifies them as (it's a pig when he's looking in the mirror). He also regularly has hallucinatory sessions with his psychiatrist, who either advises him to consume more drugs or warns him about the dangers of talking tapeworms. At one point, Bruce wakes up by vomiting all over himself in his car. He stumbles to work and is advised that he's being replaced on the murder case by his female co-worker, Amanda Drummond (Imogen Poots). As she leaves the office, he drunkenly stumbles after her, shouting that all she's done is fuck her way to the top. Amanda has the gall to turn that back around on him, and for a flash-second he advances on her, jaw clenched and fists balled. She stands tall, and invites him to hit her, if that's what he needs to do to feel any less insignificant. Bruce stops, and the weight of everything hits him again. "Oh...oh, love, I'm so sorry...I wasn't going to hit you...I would never...I wasn't going to hit you..." He collapses on the stairs and starts crying. Amanda sits with him and speaks the most eloquent summary of his condition ("You need to sort your shit out, Bruce."). And it's here that he reveals the lies he's been telling about his supposedly picturesque family life. When he tells his co-workers that they're off seeing the grandparents for the weekend, it's false. The truth is, they left him. And he's so fucked up that he can't even remember why. "I used to be a good person," he whispers, and you feel that, maybe, he might come around. But then Amanda touches his shoulder, and he has a flash that makes him see a green-faced witch in front of him. He reverts to his violent and vitriolic self, abusing Amanda until she leaves and running out the front door to destroy the first life he can get a hold of. Throughout the film, scenes are book-ended with his wife dressed in a burlesque costume spouting aggrandising parables regarding her husband. It turns out that was Bruce dressing as her to, as he put it, "keep her close." Dressing as his wife isn't the concerning part, it's that when he puts on the dress he becomes her. It's getting easier and easier to see why she got the fuck out of dodge.
At one point in Filth, Bruce and Bladesey are sitting in a gay bar, Bruce discussing how much homosexuality disgusts him and Bladesey saying that he doesn't disagree with their lifestyle, but he knows for sure and certain it's not for him. Bruce nods as he slips four ecstasy tablets into Bladesey's drink, and seconds later he's in between two men with Christmas lights around his neck, kissing them and dancing to European house music. You laugh, as you're supposed to, and then in a flash Bruce is pushing Bladesey into their hotel room, desperately trying to talk him down from his freak out. Bladesey is thrashing on the bed in a crazed panic as Bruce runs his hands through his hair and tries to remain calm. "You're fucking up my trip, man!" he shouts before following that up with, "Fuck it, you're on your own." He retreats to the bathroom, where he backs up against the door, frantically chewing his fingernails and shivering. Eventually, he stumbles out to the street, where he finds a prostitute that looks just like the projection of his wife that he dresses up as. He claws desperately at her, crying, before she fights him off, he realises his mistake and carries on, eventually collapsing in a puddle of bodily fluids. That's Filth in a nutshell. You don't get to just see the drug addict in that ten-minute window where they're fun to be around. You're stuck with him, for the whole sordid journey. He's had some bad things happen to him. On top of losing his family, he was also negligently responsible for the death of his brother when he was a child and has failed to save a couple of citizens in his line of work. But beneath all of the personal tragedies, all of the sympathy, all of the bravado, all of the handsome charm, what is there? Nothing but a pathetic shell of a man who has to ruin the lives of everyone around him so that he can avoid even a single second of acknowledging his own failures. Perhaps it's good that he kills himself. He records a video for Bladesey apologising for the person that he is and offering words of encouragement to him and his marital troubles. As Bruce is about to tip the chair over, there's a knock on the door. It's a woman and child the father of which Bruce tried and failed to resuscitate earlier in the film. They're a shot, a real shot, at him achieving some warped sense of redemption, at returning to the good person he once was. But for once, Bruce is honest with himself and, knowing that in the end he'd just ruin their lives too, he looks straight in the camera, says "Same rules apply", grins and lets himself go. His first act of human compassion is removing himself from the equation. Maybe the saddest thing about Filth is that I didn't learn anything new about people like my old boss. I walked in thinking, "People like this are fucking pathetic", the movie replied with, "Yep. They sure are", and we went our separate ways. But in the end, I appreciate the honesty. And I really appreciate getting to see Professor X in fishnets.
Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa is a heart-warming story of family love that features an old man thrusting his unnaturally long scrotum at terrified women in an all black male strip club. Go see it.
Australian films make me patriotic. Check that, good Australian films make me patriotic. Nothing gives me greater pride in my nation than one of our own showing the world that we're more than Fat Pizza, Young Einstein and The Wiggles Movie. They're few and far between though, unfortunately. With most Australian productions going through the government-run Screen Australia, it's hard to get any serious financial backing for production, let alone distribution or promotion. This has a habit of sorting the wheat from the chaff, however. When you're operating on a shoestring budget, everything falls down to the limited resources at your disposal. Some films become Animal Kingdom, some become You Can't Stop the Murders. Mystery Road is thankfully one of the former. With next to no money, it's a naturally-lit, bare bones, gorgeously filmed piece of art that takes a very slow walk through rural Queensland, turning over every dark rock to expose even darker secrets before it shrugs its shoulders and continues on.
A fusion of neo-noir and westerns, Mystery Road opens with a trucker discovering the body of a young Aboriginal girl, throat slashed open and body positioned delicately underneath a highway bridge. Returning to his home town from a 10 year job in the city, Aaron Pedersen's Aboriginal cop Jay is the only officer tasked with investigating her murder. He's met with resistance wherever he goes: some of the fellow officers see him as nothing more than a racial token, and treat his police work like he's a child playing pretend. The local white community is often the same, openly treating him with racial insensitivity, and though the Aboriginal community does see him as the same degree of police officer as his white colleagues ("You a copper, brah? We shoot coppers, brah."), they in turn see him as a traitor, a man who is happy to lock up his brothers. As he slowly, ever so slowly, continues down the rabbit hole, he uncovers a network of lies, betrayals, drugs and murder that's hiding in plain sight on all sides; a community that simultaneously reviles and requires its corruption.
Mystery Road ends with an unbelievable shootout. Almost every shady character, cop or criminal, that Jay has encountered is involved, and with no clearly defined alleigances or rivalries, everyone starts shooting at everyone. It's brutally realistic; snipers carefully line up their shot and then wait breathlessly as their bullet travels the distance to see if they need to try again. The bullet hits a car hood or rock beside their target, causing their target to flinch and curse, and then it's their target's turn. People on the ground fire blindly from cover in the general direction of their target, while others stand fully exposed firing until their clip empties, causing them to scurry desperately to cover. By the end of it, everyone is dead but Jay. He walks over to the car, reminded of couch cover fibers buried deep underneath the first victim's fingernails, and discovers claw marks in one of the vehicle's back seats. She was definitely in this car, so it's a logical conclusion that these men were her killers. But why? Why was she murdered in the first place? And why was almost every key player in the community involved in this deal? Not to mention what was the deal in the first place? And why did Hugo Weaving's dirty cop Johnno spend the whole film vaguely threatening Jay's life only to save it in the end by firing at his fellow police officer? Mystery Road answers none of these questions, nor the others that I've neglected to mention.
Parodoxically though, the film simultaneously presents no answers while confirming the conclusions the audience is invited to draw within the first thirty minutes. Initially, this left me feeling hugely frustrated. I was right in my assumptions, and yet I received no closure on them. The film merely said, "Yes, you were right." And then I realised that was the point. If someone seems shady, they probably are. If a neighbourhood looks like it has racial relation problems, it probably does. This is a community small enough that instead of a street and house number, directions are, "It's on your old street. The green roof across from the red roof." Everything's so lethargic, because it's all so obvious. Johnno asks if Jay's ever killed someone and not told anyone because he knew he could get away with it. It's a thinly-veiled, very real threat made against Jay's daughter's life, and he keeps going at his steady investigative pace, because he knew it was coming, and he knows where it will be coming from. And so the 'what' is answered, but not the 'why'. The film's themes of racism aren't even really drawing any conclusions, which once again, is the point. It's not excusing the existence of racism, it's just saying that it exists. More than that, it's not always clear the motivations are racially driven. It's certainly easy to assume Jay's being treated as inferior by his fellow officers because of his race, and in some cases it's certainly true, but is it true in all cases? He left this town for 10 years and though the sergeant says that it's good for him to be back, it's clear he's not being honest. Why did he leave in the first place? He spends the entire movie on the brink of emotional explosion, be it rage, despair or any emotion other than stone-faced inquisitiveness. Once again, there are no answers. Corrupt government-run establishments exist. Racism exists. Just plain bad people exist.
Throughout Mystery Road, the community is being terrorised by wild dogs. They're never seen, beyond a quick glance at one of them, but they're heard often, either literally or through the citizens that have come in contact with them. One of them had been biting the murder victim's arm and the coroner's report returns unidentifiable saliva. "It's almost like she was bitten by some sort of...super-dog," Jay is told. Initially, I thought they were perhaps just another unanswered question, but then I began to see them as representative of the town's corrupt citizens and their nature; that they seem to be able to run wild, attacking and eating whatever they want, with no-one willing to stop them. They just sit around complaining about it. It's a sentiment that also ties into the racial issues raised in the film. No-one in the town denies that there's disparity between the white and Aboriginal communities, but no-one is willing to do anything about it. Even Jay is guilty of this; he thinks that by trying to make an honest go of his life that it somehow solves the societal problems of his community, when in reality it just makes him selfish and naive. Which is not to say he shouldn't have pursued a career, but that he shouldn't then assume that this simple personal achievement is going to break down barriers for his entire race. A problem can't be solved with bare minimum effort and bitching. Mystery Road knows this. It also knows that the preferable action to sitting around complaining is to get objective; to stand back and view the picture as a whole. What it doesn't know is the answer. Because it's just not that simple. Racism seems like a problem, because it is. Time for me to shrug my shoulders and continue on.
