Eloise Laurence as Skunk (Film Movement)

As a kind of modern-day To Kill a Mockingbird, Broken centers on Skunk (newcomer Eloise Laurence), an 11-year-old English girl with type 1 diabetes. She’s clearly modeled after Scout in Harper Lee’s novel and Robert Mulligan’s 1962 film of To Kill a Mockingbird, in both her circumstances and appearance. She is close to her lawyer father; Archie (Tim Roth), has a caring nanny, Kasia (Zana Marjanovic); and an annoying older brother, Jed (Bill Milner); and so forth. (The children’s mother left the family when she was young.) Instead of backwoods, the siblings spend their summer days playing in a scrapyard.

The main differences arise from director Rufus Norris’s attempt to get a closer look at three fractured families living in Skunk’s neighborhood. While the 1962 film is restricted to Scout’s child point of view, Norris widens the world to include the perspective of the adults.

One afternoon, Skunk witnesses her neighbor Rick (Robert Emms) getting a vicious beating from Mr. Oswald (Rory Kinnear), the out-of-control widower across the street. One of Oswald’s teenage daughters has falsely accused the sweet but psychologically unstable Rick of rape after her father finds a condom wrapper in her room.

The girl’s lie sets off a series of events that effect Skunk profoundly. Because of her fondness for Rick, she visits him in the hospital after he has a mental and violent breakdown following his arrest. On top of witnessing the violent incident, she is constantly being bombarded with the complicated world of the adults around her: the love triangle  between Kasia; Kasia’s boyfriend, Mike (Cillian Murphy); and her father. And in school, she becomes the victim of the Oswald girls’ bullying. She also begins an innocently romantic relationship with a local boy, the modern version of Mockingbird’s Dill, and witnesses the sexual relationship between her brother and Oswald’s middle daughter. All these plot points come together in a chilling climax, which forces the neighbors to come to some kind of understanding.

Norris often depicts the incidences’ outcomes before showing the causes, jump cutting from present to past. The stories of the three families overlap visually as he cuts between each story line rapidly. He uses a shaky hand-held camera to give the film a sense of realism, and it’s all very effective. Considering Norris’s theater background, he certainly throws himself into the medium. Although towards the end, he incorporates a surreal dream sequence, and the film becomes more operatic and over-the-top in its visual style.

All in all it’s a complex coming-of-age story. At times, it feels like there is a lot going on, and I kept wishing for a more tightly focused story about Skunk’s experiences. Because of the strong references to Mockingbird, it was difficult not to wish for the simpler narrative structure of that film/novel. The film’s fast paced and absorbing, but stuffed with so many complicated issues, it’s not quite moving.