Thursday, May 08, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Film: The mourning after

The Lawless Heart explores grieving with reserved, Rashomon-like resonance

By Jeannette Catsoulis

As devotees of HBO's "Six Feet Under" know, funerals are often catalysts for emotional meltdowns of spectacular inappropriateness. The funeral that opens The Lawless Heart is no exception, though rarely has this stew of feelings been served up with such delicacy, humor or erotic longing.

The dead man is the once fun-loving restaurateur Stuart (David Coffey), drowned in a boating accident and seen only in the silent cheerfulness of old home movies. Stuart has left behind a deceptively composed lover, Nick (Tom Hollander), an ebullient boyhood friend named Tim (Douglas Henshall) and a pragmatic and angry sister, Judy (Ellie Haddington). Judy's irritation is caused by the absence of a will, leaving her to decide on the disposition of Stuart's money. Should she keep it--as her disgruntled farmer husband, Dan (Bill Nighy), insists she do--or give it to the now rootless Nick?

But The Lawless Heart is not about money. Using the technique employed by movies as diverse as Rashomon and Pulp Fiction, British writer-directors Tom Hunsinger and Neil Hunter have fashioned a story with three distinct emotional arcs, following three very different men with equally powerful desires. For Dan, Nick and Tim, Stuart's death has spiked longings that could be manifestations of fundamental needs or just temporary palliatives--either way, all three are a mess.

The film's structure is designed to reveal information a little at a time, so a bunch of flowers lying innocently on a restaurant table or a silkily feminine scarf tied jauntily around Tim's neck may be glimpsed in the first segment but only understood in the third. Similarly, an apparently innocent case of mistaken identity is later shown to be unbearably sad, and what looks like just another polite conversation at the wake takes on an entirely different meaning as the film progresses.

For Dan, the funeral has sparked a midlife crisis. Propositioned by a ripely attractive Frenchwoman, Corrine (Clémentine Célarié), he regresses to adolescence, hiding behind cars when he spies her in the street. "With our lot, there are formalities," he explains dolefully to Nick during a desultory pint in the pub, implying that gay relationships are more forgiving than straight, and unwittingly revealing a latent streak of homophobia. Dan's inertia and lack of self-knowledge make the character difficult to portray sympathetically, but the great Bill Nighy (Still Crazy) is tremendously touching here, moving like a man burdened by a farm he didn't want and a wife he has become accustomed to accommodating. "Sometimes you get these feelings and you don't know what to do with them," he says, his face void of expression; and it's a measure of Nighy's subtlety that the line goes right to your gut.

As the film doubles back to place first Nick and then Tim at the center of the narrative, the filmmakers pull off something quite wonderful, simultaneously adjusting our perceptions of the characters while increasing the complexity of their relationships. The jokes are gentle and the drama is restrained, the whole laced with moments of great poignancy and realism: Dan leaning in surreptitiously to smell Corrine's hair at the supermarket checkout; Nick's flailing attempt to connect with a free-spirited young woman (Sukie Smith); Tim's face as he selflessly orchestrates the happiness of the woman he loves (Josephine Butler)--probably his first act of real maturity.

The Lawless Heart was filmed in the marshy Essex countryside (in the town of Maldon, where director Hunter grew up), and on the Isle of Man. Cinematographer Sean Bobbitt--who also shot Michael Winterbottom's gorgeously misty urban gem Wonderland--gradually deepens his palette in conjunction with the deepening storylines, making Tim's segment the richest both emotionally and visually. With music by Adrian Johnston of The Waterboys, The Lawless Heart has a reserved, modest resonance that's extremely affecting. "I suppose I have emotions, but I don't make a meal of them," observes Dan. Exactly.