THE SELFISH GIANT A-
Great Britain (91 mi) 2013 d: Clio Barnard
Great Britain (91 mi) 2013 d: Clio Barnard
In Clio Barnard’s extraordinarily original first feature, 2011
Top Ten Films of the Year #4 The Arbor (2011), a unique study of the life
of British playwright Andrea Dunbar, who died in 1990 at the age of 29, where
the film extends the boundaries of documentary filmmaking, becoming a word play
based upon actors lip-synching 90 hours of audio interviews Barnard conducted
with Dunbar’s family and friends, a haunting and disorienting fusion of fact
and fiction extending the artist’s tragic life into the lives of her own children,
where Dunbar’s alcoholism gave way to the heroin and crack addiction of her
daughter. The director’s highly
unorthodox technique accentuates the artifice of filmmaking, showing the camera
and crew, exposing what the audience normally doesn’t see, using fictional
methods to unravel the hidden inner truths of the artist. Barnard grew up in the town of Otley in
Yorkshire, just a half hour away from Dunbar’s home of Bradford, where she’d
often go ice skating or see musical bands as a child, as her dad was a
university lecturer teaching English, mostly the Romantic poets, while her
mother was a jazz singer, with her parents separating at age 6, where she grew
up with her dad, attending art school at Leeds, Newcastle, and then Scotland,
eventually becoming a video artist with installations in art museums around the
world with a healthy skepticism about the cinematic misrepresentation of
realism. Now a teacher of film studies
at the University of Kent, in her second feature Barnard has embraced the same
social realism she critiques so fervently in The Arbor,
writing a script inspired by an Oscar Wilde children’s story about a
bad-tempered giant that won’t let children play in his idyllic garden, turning
it into a perpetual winter, becoming a searingly realistic piece about a young
boy named Arbor, where he and his best friend have a falling out, both
exploited by an unscrupulous scrap metal dealer, where they are introduced into
the harshly brutal working conditions of adults, ostracized and excluded
children pushed into the outer fringes of society where something has gone
fundamentally wrong, victims of an ever widening gap of economic inequality,
forced to endure the horrible dangers of child labor all over again due to an
insatiable capitalistic greed that so willingly puts children at risk.
The story is loosely based upon a living reality, through an
actual young boy named Matty that Barnard met while shooting The Arbor,
as he kept getting into the shot while riding his horse, a scruffy kid wearing
dirty clothes that exhibited a kind of “fuck you” attitude against others. At times he would show up with his friend Michael,
both outsiders who survived by any means necessary, where they spent their days
scavenging for scrap metal in Bradford, which is one of the thriving businesses
in the city, calling into question whether they were being exploited by the
scrap merchant or getting an opportunity.
Barnard recalls meeting his mother who told her “What the hell else is
he going to do around here? At least
he’s earning some money.” His continual
presence on the movie set eventually turned into the character of Arbor, named
after the street where Dunbar lived, showing how life has a common
stream–of-conscious thread that connects us all together. Using two non-professional child actors who
are onscreen in nearly every shot, the film is set in an oppressive Dickensian
world of poverty, exploring the close friendship that develops between two boys
who both come from dysfunctional families, with no working parents and no adult
role models, whose families are barely getting by, who are teased and bullied
by others who are less marginalized, but these two kids share a common bond of
both being outsiders where they at least have each other. Arbor (Conner Chapman) is the more impulsive
of the two, smaller, louder, openly defiant of authority, and emotionally
unpredictable, requiring medicine for his hyperactivity, while Swifty (Shaun
Thomas) is more an easy going big brother, a kindhearted kid who seems to
follow the lead of Arbor, remaining his most loyal friend and protector, even
during troubled times. Their relationship
is reminiscent of John Steinbeck’s Of
Mice and Men, which was similarly set during the economically challenged
times of the Great Depression, but here failed industrialism is a remnant of a
once thriving past in Bradford, where the economically abandoned town is
drained of any possibilities of hope.
Arbor has violent temper issues, is prone to fighting, and
is quickly expelled from school, Swifty, his sidekick, along with him, where
Swifty’s parents insist he not be a layabout at home, so they send him to
school, despite his expulsion, where he can only spend his days sitting in
perpetual detention. This perfectly
expresses how society deals with troubled kids, as they make no attempt to deal
with or treat their problems when it’s so much easier to simply rid themselves
of the problem altogether, leaving kids on the margins to fend for themselves
where they have no resources. Abandoned
by their schools and by their families, few good options await them, and society
eventually pays a price. The one place
where they can receive money is the morally dubious scrap iron dealer, Kitten
(Sean Gilder), who runs a black market business on the side and becomes the
only adult who actually seems to care about these boys, becoming their
surrogate guardian, encouraging them to work harder, which is another way of
exploiting them for cheap wages, showing them how they can burn away the traces
of stolen copper wire, which puts them in ever more precarious situations of
having to steal wire right under the noses of working electricians. While Swifty has some notion of the hazards
involved, Arbor is relentlessly fearless, developing a greedy and insatiable
appetite for more, showing a daredevil streak that tends to get them both into
trouble. For that reason, Kitten seems
to favor Swifty, allowing him to borrow a horse and cart to pick up and carry
heavier items, where he doesn’t trust the more hot-headed Arbor, who flies off
the handle at any given moment, driving a wedge between them. One of the illicit activities is harness racing
these animals down the auto roadways at dawn, where trucks and cars are driving
right alongside the horses with drunken spectators leaning out the windows
attempting to influence the outcome of the race, hoping their noise will be a
distraction, turning the race into something of a thrilling spectacle.
Unlike The Arbor,
which was shown with subtitles, this film did not, so nearly half the dialogue,
despite being spoken in English, is incomprehensible. This may alter one’s appreciation for the
film, as much of the written poetry is lost, but the audience has a feel for
the spirit of the language, where illiterate youth and the profoundly
uneducated from impoverished communities have a way of wrapping their regional
dialogue in slang, gutter talk, and profanity, all of which further alienates
them from the mainstream. One of the
most haunting recurring images is seeing how humanity from a dilapidated
tenement housing project swells into close proximity to a cluster of five
nuclear power smokestacks, as they did in THE RED RIDING TRILOGY (2009) which
was also set in Yorkshire. When Arbor
and Swifty get away from it all, they wander into a pastoral green field
containing an endless stream of giant electrical transmission towers,
inhabitants of a veritable wasteland that extends into the horizon. These toxic images have a life force all
their own, seen as a monstrous looming presence hovering off in the distance,
continually threatening to have a major impact.
While the film is about a boyhood friendship that rises out of the
depths of poverty and despair, it’s also about loss, where to their mothers
these boys are lost children pushed beyond their control, where that feeling of
loss permeates over everything that happens by the wrenching finale, which
expresses an all consuming despair not seen since the end of Brokeback Mountain (2005), or the melancholic The Sweet Hereafter (1997), where the near wordless images beautifully comment on everything that
came before, altering our view of their friendship and the connecting families
in the community, providing additional meaning to what feels incomprehensible,
where the bleak devastation of dire poverty has rarely been expressed with such
poetic eloquence. The film is about what
happens when society ignores cries for help, where the inevitable tragedies
that occur will haunt and literally redefine people’s scarred lives. A remarkably intelligent work of rare insight
and daring, shot with visual acuity from cinematographer Mike Eley, Barnard
examines the effects of postindustrial England with stark realism, where with
utter compassion, and never pity, Barnard literally shames a nation to
rediscover its own rich heritage and humanity.
Short
Stories: The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde - East of the Web complete text of the story
