Film: Songbirds & Skinheads

National Review, Dec 31, 1998 by John Simon

I wasn't all that keen on Jim Cartwright's original stage play The Rise and Fall of Little Voice; I am still less so on the movie version, which besides shrinking the title to Little Voice diminishes the work itself. Mark Herman, who gave us the delightful Brassed Off, has again adapted a stage piece and directed it, this time to less good effect. It is the tale of Laura, known as Little Voice, or LV for short, who with her late father, the owner of a small-town record shop, used to listen raptly to LPs of Judy Garland, Shirley Bassey, Marlene Dietrich, and other chanteuses. With her father dead, LV is at the mercy of her termagant mother, from whom she retreats into her attic room and record collection. She sings along with those popular singers and can impersonate them to uncanny perfection.

When not alone and singing, LV is shyness personified. Small, with childlike blonde bangs over a sweetly homely face, she hardly speaks, much to her gabby mother's annoyance. The mother, Mari, is involved with Ray Say, chief impresario of the English seaside town of Scarborough. Ray has flunked out of the big time in London, Mari is well past her prime: the two losers take to each other with a gusto born of anxiety. Their relationship is depicted comically, but with an edge of sadness down to their exaggerated clothes and not entirely cozy banter.

Off to the side is Billy, a young assistant telephone repairman, timid and taciturn, comfortable only with the pigeons he breeds. Yet Dwayne, his most fine-feathered friend, has forgotten he is a homing pigeon and flown the coop. While repairing Mari's telephone, Billy meets LV, and they attract each other. Now Ray discovers LV's vocal talent and sees in her his last big chance as an impresario. But the acutely timorous LV shies away from public performance. And yet . . . but enough of that.

It is a fiercely improbable story, but it does involve some interesting characters. Aside from the aforementioned, there are Sadie, the grotesquely obese neighbor who worships Mari and LV, and Mr. Boo, owner of the town's biggest nightclub, where between the awful acts he fobs off his own equally awful MC-ing. And there is Scarborough itself, a Potemkin village with a charming horseshoe-shaped bay and, beyond it, mingy, industrial streets and benighted inhabitants.

Herman has depoeticized the play's language (not that much of a loss) and opened up the action. Yet it is confinement that the play capitalized on, what with Mari yelling from below and LV unresponsive upstairs, refusing to be coaxed down, or descending only to cast a pall on the bustle below. But Herman's changes have not greatly harmed a contrived plot, and his casting, at any rate, is flawless.

Jane Horrocks, with her expert impersonations, was born to play LV in a part and play created by the author especially for her. But such a talent seems more appropriate to a London actress than to a provincial mouse. Still, her performance works, although somewhat less well on screen, where the audience may (unjustly) suspect trickery. Brenda Blethyn re-creates the part of Mari and is, despite a regional accent thicker than anybody else's, very fine in her blend of callousness and pathos. No less remarkable is the Ray of Michael Caine, whom the depredations of age on top of his natural talent for lowlife parts catapult to a summit performance.

The dependable Jim Broadbent, as the seedy Mr. Boo, finds the humanity in tawdriness. Annette Badland's even more pathetic Sadie is as sterling as she was on stage, and Ewan McGregor, at the opposite end of the scale from his signature role in Trainspotting, struggles manfully with the underwritten part of Billy. If your expectations from Little Voice are modest enough you might just make a meal of it-lean cuisine though it is.

n American History X has itself a strange history. Terry Kaye, a 46-year-old British MTV and commercial-filmmaker, directed and shot this as a five-hour film. He was still fiddling with it after a year in post-production, costing another million and a half. Thereupon New Line Cinema snatched it away from him and let the star, Edward Norton, recut it, allegedly in the director's presence, to two hours. Kaye threatened to have his name removed and organize protests wherever the film was shown, but made good on neither threat. Self-admittedly, he suffers from a Kubrick complex, though (unadmittedly) lacking Kubrick's talent.

The film's cut version does manage to hustle along without too noticeable a limp. Inevitably, however, some scenes feel foreshortened, others merely indicated by an opening shot. The hero's change from rabid skinhead to solid citizen after his prison experience is made less persuasive by a certain jerky episodicity. Even so, the film is not without power in its crucial sequences, greatly helped by fine performances. Further, Kaye and his screenwriter, David McKenna, have a good eye-or two-for the telling detail.

Derek Vinyard and his adoring younger brother, Danny, become even closer after their fireman father is shot to death by a black man while putting out a blaze in a crack house. Even before that, their father was inculcating racism and xenophobia in them. Oddly-if not incredibly-both Doris, the mother, and Davina, the studious sister, remain staunch liberals throughout, although Doris is driven to heavy smoking and a racking cough.