Vintage Reviews

unity768

Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2010)



Writer/Director Andrea Arnold, who crafted the critically acclaimed small thriller titled Red Road, undeniably knows her way around a camera. Set in a housing project in Britain, Fish Tank is a harrowing, gritty, no-holds-bar coming-of-age indie that provocatively asks us to follow the life of a troubled teen. Although Arnold’s work on the surface recalls teen film triumphs like Thirteen, Fish Tank has a way about it that only a small handful of movies have in their arsenals; the ability to completely get under the skin of its protagonist. Last year a much under-appreciated film by the name of Where the Wild Things Are came out, and the big splash it made in my mind had a lot to do with the way Spike Jonze went about studying the adventurous Max. Likewise to Wild Things, Fish Tank is more about character mood and less about plot. Although not as stylized or as dialectally provocative as the best picture nominee An Education, Andrea Arnold has crafted a film that really makes you wonder how mother’s across the nation can rant and rave about the generic and cliché “Lifetime” movies depicting teen girls and their adolescent issues with ill advised narrow strokes.

Right from the opening sequences you can tell 15 year old Mia, played wonderfully by Katie Jarvis, is troubled, hurt, confused, sympathetic, understanding, and caring. She walks about the projects and tries to free a chained up horse, numerous times. Despite knowing the consequences, she keeps trying. At the same time she yells and screams at her kid sister, who’s got quite the dirty mouth herself, and her mother Joanne, given life by Kierston Wareing in a performance that echoes Amy Ryan’s rough portrayal in the near masterful Gone Baby Gone. She shows very little care for her burdened daughter. Mia does not have many friends, as we see her head-butt a girl with her posse trying to practice some kind of dance routine. Dancing is Mia’s way out of reality, a self expression technique. She practices in an abandoned apartment of sorts, mostly to hip hop music. No, no, no this does not turn into some sort of mother reconciliation story like in Save the Last Dance; Arnold is a talented enough auteur to follow our leading lady with graceful strokes, much like the way Darren Aronofsky followed Randy “The Ram” in The Wrestler.

The film begins to carefully transition away from its slice-of-life and more towards a narrative when Connor, Joanne’s new boyfriend, starts popping up more and more. The family breaks from their routine shtick of nothingness when Connor offers to take the girls, along with Joanne, out to the pond to catch a fish. What Connor is up to we are at first unsure. It should be obvious but Arnold’s script builds the character with such loving care. Perhaps it is the loneliness of Mia that disguises this man for the moment. He shows her amusement when he dances in the parking lot, and shows her caring when trying to teach her how to catch a fish with just the bare hands. He lets her borrow his camera so that she could tape herself dancing and submit it for a job opportunity. However, a quick scene involving Joanne and an associate who wants to talk to Mia about some sort of boarding school overshadows much of what occurs during the 123 minutes we spend with this teenager. The aforementioned is very understandable.

Much of the dialogue here is limited. Rarely do we see large chunks of excessive conversation. Fish Tank is concerned about the tolls a society takes on the mind of an adolescent, and how that adolescent excruciatingly yearns for some sort of stable environment. Arnold takes various stills of birds flying in the sky, long pauses at a toy butterfly hovering over Mia’s bed. Are we forever a product of our society or do we all have free will, waiting to be lit by a heart wrenching fire we cannot stop from coming? As with Catherine Hardwicke’s debut feature Thirteen, Mia begins to sexually awaken, and explores her surrounding “prison”, if you will, with this kind of mentality. The familiar climax that occurs near the tail end of the second act is kind of predictable, but it is all the more emotionally crushing based upon Arnold’s ability to see the world through Mia’s eyes. On and on I kept asking myself, should I trust this guy? He has a good heart, is this going where I think it is? I wanted to follow my gut, but my brain is always more consistent. Mia learns this same lesson.

Arnold’s first film, Red Road, is described as a thriller, and Fish Tank tends to slightly go down this road in its third half. Mia begins to see the world more clearly, like Carrie Mulligan’s character in An Education, and rather than fall back onto a professional figure, because she does not have one, she lashes out on foolish revenge. The tension is built with superb adequacy. Arnold never forgets the structure hungry mind of Mia, as she sits in an ordinary family house, alone, wondering why God dealt her a bad hand. The bravado performance from first timer Katie Jarvis expresses the toughest of emotions with facial expressions that will give almost all of its audience nightmares. Additionally, the emotionally satisfying narrative that easily transitions to this partial thriller, fails to come alive without the subtle but complex performance from Michael Fassbender. You want to love him, but you know your going to hate him.

Even if Fish Tank is not covering any new ground most of the time, it still provides a powerful visceral punch when coming to its conclusion. Critics, who I believe, wrongfully blamed the calm concluding sequences in An Education will be given a treat here. At the end of the day Mia comes to realize the world is not always going to be a fair place, even when a glimmer of hope seems to be in the palm of your hand. Some kids are spoiled because their parents have money. Others have parents who show little care, as Mia’s mother says “***** off” at the film’s ending moments. However, in a poignant scene where we, for the first time, see the three members of the family in a harmonic activity together, Arnold’s message of resilience becomes rooted in the mind. Mia’s path remains ambiguous, never once betraying the authenticity it carried for its entire run-time

Stars (out of four): ***1/2

Neverending
It's... pretty good. Everything that Unity768 said is true. But there was some things that bothered me. The mom is supposed to be this 30-something woman who's living in near poverty and has a teenage daughter, and yet, she looks like a model. That was very distracting. And even though she was pretty hot, Michael Fassbender's character wastes his time having sex with the daughter. Why f--k up a good thing? And speaking of Fassbender, I didn't see the point of him having this intense fling with the both of them. Once you learn the truth about him you realize how pointless everything was.

JBond
I didn't really care for it. The ending with the kid was so out of left field.