Harry Brown Review

After a long and distinguished career, Michael Caine has announced his retirement from lead film roles aiming to instead focus on supporting parts. Having burst on to the film scene with the likes of Get Carter and Zulu, the erstwhile Mr Micklewhite has been an enduring screen personality in fare ranging from Jaws: The Revenge through to Hannah And Her Sisters. His final bow comes in the shape of debut helmer Daniel Barber’s Harry Brown. The weight of playing host to a true legend like Caine’s last lead role could have overshadowed most films, a feat which Barber attempts to sidestep with his bold, if flawed, entry into the revenge film canon.

   Caine stars, in a role pitched somewhere between Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino and his own Get Carter, as the titular Harry Brown, a man very deeply at odds with modern Britain. He is a lonesome elderly gent stuck in a slow inert routine with little to do but mind his own business and have the occasional pint and game of chess with his friend Len. They live in the middle of a London housing estate where violence and disorder are the status quo matched in depressive terms only by the bleak, saturated colours the world they inhabit is painted. When Len is murdered by “hoodies” (young feral British hoodlums named after the hooded tops that constitute their favourite item of clothing), Brown is at a loss with what to do with himself; the authorities seem unwilling, or at least unable, to act out against the perpetrators of the crime. A former member of the navy, Brown employs his military training to plot a revenge mission to bring about justice by methodically and systematically slaying each person responsible for his friends death.

   The films strengths lay in Barber’s direction which is inventively successful in continually stepping into new territories without ever jarring. As the film opens and we get to see Brown in his own environment, Barber suggests the film ahead of us is going to be a Ken Loach-esque realist film – the film’s palette is muted and murky reflecting both the grim environment Brown inhabits and signposting the tropes of a traditional British drama. Yet as time progresses and the film becomes more sensationalist and action filled, Brown and cinematographer Martin Ruhe create something rarely seen in British cinema; a stylistic triumph. The soft palette becomes more vibrant as Brown’s mundane life of quiet chats and chess is swapped for lively chase sequences, tense showdowns and brutal, bloody murder. The almost cartoon like greens featured in a memorable meeting between Brown and a gun dealer named Stretch are unlike anything else that has been committed to celluloid in British cinema this year. Similarly excellent, as always, in Caine whose heavy lidded face tells the story of a world weary yet hardened individual who has seen more than many of us could imagine.

   However, films are best reviewed in three stages; the formal, the guttural and the cerebral. Harry Brown is a formally astounding piece, no doubt. The mise-en-scene, the cinematography, the disparate performances from the whole cast. Similarly the film is a fantastic guttural experience; tense, thrilling even moving at points.

   Yet the one level Harry Brown fails at is the cerebral. For all its right’s, the more that Barber’s film is meditated upon, the more of a disappointment it becomes. Whilst not as ludicrous or as ill-conceived a piece of work as Nick Love’s idiotic polemic Outlaw there are some serious ideological flaws. The happily ever after, all loose ends tied-up finale does seem to suggest an advocacy in vigilantism. The one dimensional feral hoodie youths are portrayed as savages seen more in horror films; they exist solely as forces of pure evil, obstacles to be overcome by the hero of the hour looking to bring back a sense of normality and moral goodness – in another film their roles could just have easily been taken by zombies, vampires or aliens. Many films make social critiques using horror’s tenants as metaphors to comment on social ills. In Harry Brown, however, the tenants are accepted but not subverted; the lower classes are quite literally demonized. An example would be Sean Harris’ debased Stretch character, a dead eyed repulsively sleazy mass of scars, who would not appear at all out of place in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser. No effort is made to understand the antagonists and, instead of offering any sociological analysis of the culture the film is commenting on, moral panics are deepened and furthered.

   So whilst the film is marvellously crafted, delightfully paced and an overall technical success there are some questions that linger regarding the film’s intent long after the screen fades to black. To paraphrase another Michael Caine role: “What’s it all about?”

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