“BRIGHTON ROCK” My rating: B- (Opening Oct. 7 at the Glenwood at Red Bridge)
111 minutes | No MPAA rating
For his feature film directing debut, Rowan Joffe (he was the screenwriter for George Clooney’s “The American” and the zombie flick “28 Weeks Later”) has turned to the classics, so to speak.
Or at least to Graham Greene.
“Brighton Rock” is the second screen adaptation of Greene’s 1938 novel about a ruthless young hoodlum and his naive girlfriend in the titular British resort town.
The original 1947 film made a star of young Richard Attenborough, who played the amoral young thug Pinkie Brown; it’s unlikely the same will be said of any of the cast members of this version.
Not that the film is poorly acted. It isn’t. But even with a happy ending tacked on (the same happy ending tacked onto the previous version), this is a sad, soul-sucking experience.
Pinkie (Sam Riley) is rising in the ranks of upwardly mobile criminals operating in and around Brighton’s famous pier. Early on he kills a rival, but there’s a potential witness who might be able to identify him to the police.
This is Rose (Andrea Riseborough), a plain, unsophisticated waitress at a local tea parlor. With Pinkie’s spiffy clothes and come-on lines (only a backwards girl like Rose would fail to see the menace behind his behavior), the young criminal hopes to sweep her off her feet and keep her that way…at least until an opportunity to dispose of her permanently presents itself. He goes so far as to literally buy Rose from her alcoholic father.
None of this is lost on Rose’s tea house employer, Ida (Helen Mirren), long acquainted with Brighton’s criminal underground. The man Pinkie killed was her friend; now she’s on the case, both to save the unsuspecting Rose and to take revenge on Pinkie.
Writer/director Joffe has done a very smart thing in updating “Brighton Rock” to the early ’60s and making Pinkie a motor scooter-riding and nattily attired (but no less lethal) example of the then-burgeoning Mod phenomenon. It adds a lot to the tale’s atmosphere.
And he’s done a fine job of capturing the tawdry glamour of post-war Brighton, where tourists packed dance halls and gnawed on “Brighton Rock,” huge sticks of cheap sugary candy.
But good luck with finding a character to invest in. Riley’s Pinkie is a reptilian schemer so openly contemptuous of Rose you wonder why she sticks around; Riseborough makes of Rose a sad, pathetic nothing.
Mostly it falls to Mirren’s former gang doll to give the film any sort of moral perspective. There, at least, we’re in very good hands.
| Robert W. Butler
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