Better Scotch
Orphans delivers hipness with a heart.
You've
got to feel sorry for the Scottish Board of Tourism. First the Loch Ness
monster is exposed as a fake, then the film industry
starts to pick up. Now, normally, a successful film industry would be great for
a country's image, but in the case of Scotland, it seems counterproductive,
since most of the films depict a land overrun with skinheaded thugs who address
everyone as "fucking cunt" before drinking large amounts of beer and
vowing to beat into a bloody pulp anyone who so much as looks at them
cross-eyed. It's as if the
The latest import from the land
of the thistle is no different, but it does at least take the time to show us
why we should give a damn. Orphans, written and directed by My Name
Is Joe star Peter Mullan, features ample blood, profanity, and
pint-swilling to appease the Danny Boyle/Andrew MacDonald acolytes in the
audience but displays an underlying faith in humanity that Trainspotting
and Shallow Grave never had.
When their mother dies of a
heart attack, grieving siblings Thomas (Gary Lewis), Michael (Douglas Henshall,
looking like Kenneth Branagh by way of Jeffrey Jones), John (Stephen McCole,
previously turned into a fly in The Acid House), and cerebral-palsied
Sheila (newcomer Rosemarie Stevenson) all react in their own unique fashions.
With a funeral scheduled for the next day, Thomas, the eldest and most
straitlaced (read anal) makes a promise to his late mother to stay all night in
the church and watch over her coffin. Before he can get to the church, however,
he stops at a karaoke bar with the rest of his family, where he sings a
teary-eyed song that causes many of the drunk patrons
to laugh at him, and brothers Michael and John to start a fight with same.
Before long Michael is stabbed (not fatally), John is vowing revenge, and
Thomas and Sheila are in the church, where Sheila does not want to be for the
entire night, though her physical condition prohibits her from being left
alone. When Sheila rebels by ramming her wheelchair into a statue of the Virgin
Mary, shattering it on the floor, Thomas loses his cool and sends her home by
herself. How the characters make their way through the night to their mother's
funeral provides the crux of the action: Sheila tries to get home in her
wheelchair, John searches for revenge, Thomas determines to hold fast in the
church no matter what, and Michael engages in a bizarre quest to make it to
work so he can pretend the stab wound was sustained on the job and get
workmen's comp.
Grief lurks at every turn,
causing the characters to react in a generally hostile and unpredictable fashion
to their surroundings, which include plenty of the aforementioned drunken thugs
with their profane term of address, in addition to more unpredictable fare.
Sheila finds herself "adopted" by a group of young girls in party
hats who sing French nursery rhymes; John enlists the help of a thuggish, Billy
Connolly-loving delivery man to obtain a gun, only to wind up an accessory to a
surreal home invasion; and Michael, with his stab wound oozing conspicuously
all the while, discovers a bar where the penalty for less-than-perfect behavior
is to get locked in the storeroom for the rest of the night. There's a good
deal of humor to these proceedings, but never does it mock the grief of our
principals, nor do the chuckles come at the expense of their humanity. Every
punch, every drop of blood is earned and taken seriously; these guys may be
tough, but not indestructible, not by a long shot. When Michael suggests that a
vulnerable foe needs to have his head smashed in with bricks, then be turned on
his back so that he chokes on his own blood, the rest of the cast are suitably
appalled, despite having been horribly victimized by the same foe. "But
I'm not really the best person to ask right now," adds Michael, who then
offers the alternate suggestion to simply take the man's wallet and "run
like fuck."
Orphans is essentially in the
tradition of such movies as After Hours and The Out-of-Towners,
in which a beleaguered protagonist must navigate a city at night and against
all obstacles make it to an appointment the next day. The twist here is that
not only are there four protagonists (one of whom doesn't budge, and thus would
seem to have no obstacles), but also that they choose the dark path
through rain-soaked streets, driven by sorrow to confront something, anything,
that they can take out their frustrations on rather than admit helplessness.
Factor in an unexpectedly high level of dark humor, and the resulting film
captures the perfect balance of hipness and despair that so many aspire to, all
without any gratuitous gunplay or smarmy pop-cultural references.
Curiously enough, it's the
straitlaced brother Thomas who comes off the worst. He's on his best behavior
the whole time, even going so far as to pathetically attempt to cement together
the shattered Virgin Mary statue, but is so uptight that he won't break a
promise even to help family in need. Meanwhile, his two brothers, having
behaved terribly and suffered for it, come off all the more heroic. Sheila has less obstacles in her way, but is constantly fighting against
her own physical inadequacies, never more so than when trying to use the toilet
at a stranger's house. The moral, one supposes, is that going out into the
world and suffering is still better than not trying at all.
For all the Scots-impaired out there,
Orphans, like The Acid House, features English subtitles to
clarify the thick accents of the actors. However, viewers should be warned that
not all of the language is transcribed accurately: "get pissed" is
left as is, despite meaning "get drunk" as opposed to "get
mad," but "aye" is frequently translated as "all
right," and "I need a fag" is written "I need a
smoke." Fortunately for the audience, the faces of the actors require very
little interpretation, and the easily offended should note that "fucking
cunt" can be understood in virtually any accent.