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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
SUBMARINE  Early in
Submarine, an acrid, enjoyable British import, a young man named
Oliver Tate stands on a beach at sunset, hands in his pocket, collar
popped, as he gazes manfully out into the horizon. He likes to imagine,
he tells the viewer in one of his frequent voice-overs, that he’s taking
part in a documentary about “a prominent intellectual struggling with
unspeakable loss.”
Tate (Craig Roberts), our sleepy-eyed, teenage hero, is a young male you’ve met before. He’s Max Fischer in Rushmore or Walt Berkman in The Squid and the Whale, a bad and unpopular student, fanning his dim flicker of self-esteem with great gusts of pretentious pseudo-learning. Oliver, for instance, is the kid who reads Nietzsche at the dinner table. He also memorizes the dictionary. True, he’s harassed by bullies, but he’s not nice. In fact, he’s cruel, with a nerd’s ruthless solipsism. To impress a girl he has a crush on, he pushes a fat classmate into a puddle. Later, to revive his faltering romance, he considers poisoning the girl’s dog. With Submarine, set in a Welsh coastal town in the 1980s and based on a novel by Joe Dunthorne, we are dealing with what might be called the hipster bildungsroman. This genre appeals to certain people (like me), I think, because it tends to give us a superior version of our younger selves: an insufferable, mean-spirited asshat—but one who actually gets the girl. Yet in one of the film’s smart touches, the girl in question, Jordana Bevan (Yasmin Paige), is no trophy. She’s a round-faced pyromaniac with bad skin. She likes, for example, to compulsively burn Oliver’s leg hair with matches.While trying to win her over, Oliver also must save his parents’ marriage. His scrawny marine biologist dad (Noah Taylor), shriveled by life, and his plain, uncomfortably frank mother (an excellent Sally Hawkins) no longer have sex—Oliver can tell because the dimmer switch in their bedroom is never used. And dangerously, his mother’s old flame has just moved in next door. The neighbor (Paddy Considine), the weakest bit in the movie and essentially an indie-movie prop, is a mullet-wearing slick who peddles New Age self-help videos. In case you didn’t realize: yes, the quirk factor is high. Characters occasionally talk into the camera, everyone is weird in a charmingly unique way, and the compositions are fussed over and exact. But the quirkiness is never off-balancing. And the performances are so uniformly spot-on that except for the mullet-clad neighbor, the characters mostly feel like actual characters and not just walking accumulations of eccentricity. The real standout is Hawkins. Her character, Jill, is perplexed and slightly annoyed by the whole of existence. Every action she takes seems to catch her by surprise—even simply walking about with a cake is transformed into a weird, off-putting exercise in anomie. But newcomer Roberts holds his own, and manages to carry a movie that features him in nearly every scene. Incidentally, he looks uncannily like Martin Freeman (from the British version of The Office) after an injection of age-reversing serum.
Still, the movie, executive-produced by Ben Stiller, of all people (keep
your eyes very sharply peeled for the cameo), is perhaps best enjoyed by
not dwelling on it for too long. Writer-director Richard Ayoade, making
his feature debut, is very talented, but has some bad habits. He lazily
relies on a blandly jangly pop soundtrack (courtesy of the Arctic
Monkeys frontman Alex Turner) to cue the melancholy. And the film
generally suffers from a tired hipster aesthetic, where typewriters and
other pre-digital devices receive loads of nostalgic affection. Also,
Submarine’s ending is a bit of a cop-out, lacking the punch it seems
to be pulling back to deliver. As Oliver says about his girlfriend at
one point, one suspects the filmmakers, at the end, have just “gone soft
on the inside.”
Brendon Nafziger
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