Orphans
UK 1997
Reviewed by Edward Lawrenson
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
Glasgow, the present. On the eve of his mother's funeral, Thomas Flynn sings a tribute to her at a local pub, attended by his siblings Michael, John and Sheila. Duncan, a local youth, laughs and is attacked by Michael for his disrespect. In the ensuing fight, Michael is stabbed. John vows to kill Duncan. He tracks down his cousin Tanga and asks him to find him a gun. Thomas spends the night with his mother's coffin in the church. When he refuses to take his wheelchair-bound sister Sheila home, she leaves alone, but her wheelchair becomes stuck. Passer-by Carole comes to her aid and takes her to meet her family. Tanga procures a gun without bullets for John. They make a return visit to Mr Bell, one of the regular customers Tanga delivers carryout meals to. Tanga forces himself into the house and threatens to rape Bell's wife, but John makes him leave.
After dressing his wounds, Michael goes to a pub. When he mildly protests at the landlord Hanson's rudeness, Hanson locks him in the beer cellar with three other unruly customers. They break the door down, tie up Hanson and help themselves to drink. A storm rips off the church roof. The next morning Michael turns up at work and tries to pass off his stab wound as an industrial accident. Weakened by blood loss he falls in the River Clyde. Having acquired some bullets, John fires on Duncan but misses when he notices the baby he's carrying. They fight; John flees. Turning up at the makeshift funeral, John encounters an ailing Michael who collapses and is taken to hospital. Later, the family are reunited by their mother's grave.
Review
Early on in Orphans, Thomas, the eldest of the four Flynn siblings, mounts the stage of his local pub to croon a mawkish love song in honour of his deceased mother. His drunken audience are torn between two responses: do they sit in silence out of respect for his grief or, like the grinning Duncan, openly deride Thomas' off-key and laughably bad performance? Watching Peter Mullan's debut film you recognise their dilemma. Mixing harrowing scenes of a family at grief with high comedy (the film contains moments of sustained knockabout which play like Rab C. Nesbit out-takes) Orphans doesn't so much tread a delicate line between these two modes as career wildly back and forth between them like a drunken mourner. Given this, Orphans makes for difficult viewing.
The bleak austerity of the opening scene, in which we're introduced through long takes to the Flynns ranged around their mother's open coffin, recalls the determinedly dour sensibility of Scottish director Bill Douglas. But Mullan audaciously follows this up with a Farrelly Brothers-type ejaculation gag and pokes fun at Thomas' piety. Such humour could so easily have trivialised his attempts to depict the painful business of grieving. Thomas' comment on deciding to carry his mother's coffin to her grave singlehandedly - "She ain't heavy, she's my mother" - is a clanger which perhaps betrays Mullan's experience as a sitcom writer. But then the easy laughs and flat irony offered here are trumped by the following image of Thomas, grimacing with pain, emotionally and physically crushed under the weight of the coffin. It's a fine balancing act that Mullan and his acrobatic actor Gary Lewis pull off, giving us a deft piece of physical comedy, but, like the bulk of Orphans, one that is underpinned by a palpable and very raw sense of loss.
An acclaimed short-film director accustomed to the form's visual economy, Mullan has an eye for quietly affecting, connotatively rich visuals. A wheelchair-bound Sheila stuck down an alley as threatening noises-off fill the soundtrack; a drunk, clad only in jeans and a T-shirt, blithely strolling down a storm-lashed street as braver souls take shelter: Mullan's image of Glasgow is built out of these bizarre nocturnal encounters and strangely resonant narrative and visual fragments. It's a little reminiscent of (but not quite as full blown as) the alternate reality painted by Alasdair Gray's landmark novel Lanark. However, when Mullan does veer into Gray's baroque territory, ripping the roof from the church where Thomas is spending the night, it feels like a hand-of-God intervention from a director out to grab attention.
Orphans' quietly assured surrealist slant places it in a Scottish tradition diametrically opposed to the hard-boiled realism of such writers as William McIlvanney and Peter McDougall. Indeed, that tradition's insistently masculine bias - and the lasting stereotype of the Glasgow hardman it has perpetuated - is slyly subverted throughout Orphans. Just as the film's tone feels fractured, so the surface sheen of quiet sufferance, of manly endurance which the three brothers set great store by also cracks spectacularly. Most obviously, John's attempt to play the tough guy comes to nothing when his obdurate vow to shoot Duncan is let down, first by inadequate equipment (he has a gun, but no bullets), second by compassion. But the traditional and rigidly male roles his two other brothers have set themselves also prove elusive: elder brother Thomas' attempt to play the patriarch ends up alienating everyone; and Michael's plan to be a breadwinner for his estranged family consists of a botched attempt to win compensation for a faked industrial accident.
Mullan is best known for his lead role in Ken Loach's My Name Is Joe. Unsurprisingly, the powerful and sensitive performance he gave there finds echoes in the work of his cast, particularly Douglas Henshall as Michael and a quietly touching turn from first-time actor Rosemarie Stevenson as Sheila. But Mullan is more than an actors' director. When, wearing workers' overalls soaked in his own blood, Michael falls into the river where he works, the camera follows him as he floats serenely past a deindustrialised Clyde. It's an image of male vulnerability, but it also plays like an oblique elegy to the shipyards that once stood there. In an instant, the film reverberates with the passion and anger of Loach's far more politicised movie. It's a measure of Mullan's success (and confidence) that even by the end of his rough and ambitious film, he's still not ready to give up on surprising us.
Credits
- Producer
- Frances Higson
- Screenplay
- Peter Mullan
- Director of Photography
- Grant Scott Cameron
- Editor
- Colin Monie
- Designer
- Campbell Gordon
- Music
- Craig Armstrong
- ©Channel Four Television Corporation
- Production Companies
- Channel Four Films presents in association with The Scottish Arts Council National Lottery Fund and The Glasgow Film Fund an Antoine Green Bridge production
- For The Glasgow Film Fund and Channel 4
- Development funded by The Scottish Film Production Fund
- Executive Producer
- Paddy Higson
- Production Co-ordinator
- Gillian Berrie
- Production Manager
- Martell
- Location Manager
- John Booth
- Assistant Directors
- Mark Goddard
- Guy Heeley
- Mike Queen
- 2nd Unit:
- Ted Mitchell
- Neil Smith
- Script Supervisor
- Janis Watt
- Casting Director
- Doreen Jones
- Rostrum Camera
- Malcolm Paris
- Camera Operator
- 2nd Unit:
- Oliver Cheeseman
- Steadicam Operator
- John Ward
- Visual/Model Effects
- Roy Field
- Matte/Scene Artist
- Cliff Culley
- Model Cameraman
- Neil Culley
- Model Construction
- Steve Corduroy
- Optical Printer
- Dick Dimbleby
- Special Effects
- Supervisor:
- Stuart Brisdon
- Operators:
- Mark Haddenham
- Mike Tilley
- Colin Tilley
- Nick Cooper
- Art Director
- Frances Connell
- Storyboard Artist
- Alan Reid
- Costume Designer
- Lynn Aitken
- Wardrobe Supervisor
- Margie Fortune
- Make-up Designer
- Anastasia Shirley
- Title Artwork
- Blue Peach
- Opticals
- GSE
- Mick Lennie
- Orchestra
- The Scottish BT Ensemble
- Music Supervisor
- Sandy Dworniak
- Music Programmer
- Richard T. Norris
- Music Engineer
- Paul Hulme
- Soundtrack
- "Ye Can Come and See the Baby" by Will Fyffe, performed by Hugh Ferris, Lex Keith; "The Air That I Breath" by Mike Hazlewood, Albert Hammond, performed by Gary Lewis; "Going Doon the Water" by Neil Grant, Andy Stewart, performed by Hugh Ferris, Lex Keith; "You Take the High Road" (trad), performed by Hugh Ferris, Lex Keith; "Bean-Bag (Fairground Music)" by Shandy and Dave
- Solo Concert Extracts
- "Marie's Wedding", "The Jobby Wheecha!!!", "The Crucifixion" by/performed by Billy Connolly
- Sound Design
- Reelworks
- Sound Recordist
- Peter Brill
- Supervising Dubbing Editor
- Hilary Wyatt
- Dubbing Mixer
- Pat Hayes
- Dialogue Editor
- Lorraine Keiller
- ADR
- Mixer:
- Mike Prestwood Smith
- Additional:
- Bronek Korda
- Foley
- Artists:
- Lionel Selwyn
- Felicity Cotterell
- Recordist:
- Ted Swanscott
- Religious Technical Adviser
- Rev Vincent Perricone
- Stunt Co-ordinator
- Nick Powell
- Armourer
- Bernard Shepherd
- Cast
- Douglas Henshall
- Michael Flynn
- Gary Lewis
- Thomas Flynn
- Stephen McCole
- John Flynn
- Rosemarie Stevenson
- Sheila Flynn
- Frank Gallagher
- Tanga
- Alex Norton
- Hanson
- Dave Anderson
- Uncle Ian
- Deirdre Davis
- Alison, Carole's mum
- Maureen Carr
- Minnie, in basement
- Laurie Ventry
- Henry, in basement
- Malcolm Shields
- DD Duncan
- Eric Barlow
- Mr Bell
- Jan Wilson
- Sandra, woman in bar
- Sheila Donald
- Mrs Finch
- Ann Swan
- Rose Flynn, mother of family
- Gilbert Martin
- Frank
- Lenny Mullan
- Julian, bar manager
- June Brogan
- Mona
- Paul Doonan
- Lenny, Duncan's brother
- Linda Cuthbert
- Evelyn, waitress in bar
- Lex Keith
- Hugh Ferris
- themselves
- Joel Strachan
- Neil, lad in toilet
- Tam White
- Alistair, taxi driver
- Vanya Eadie
- Maria, receptionist at Evettes
- Dorothy Jane Stewart
- Margaret
- Michael Mallon
- Rab, cheeky boy in street
- James Casey
- Peachy, cheeky boy in street
- Alan Gracie
- James, cheeky boy in street
- Jim Twaddale
- Liam, bus driver
- Frances Carrigan
- Mrs Bell
- Judith A. Williams
- Amanda, baby-sitter
- Michael Sharpe
- David Flynn, Michael's son
- Laura O'Donnell
- Carole
- Lee-Ann McCran
- Anne Marie, paper-girl
- Debbie Welsh
- Melissa, paper-girl
- Donna Chalmer
- Bernadette, paper-girl
- Sarah Hepburn
- Louise, Carole's sister
- Martha Leishman
- Alice
- Catherine Connell
- Angela Flynn, Michael's daughter
- John Commeford
- Ed, Carole's dad
- Stephen Docherty
- Alastair, barman in pub
- Louise Dunn
- Moira, woman collecting
- Luke Coulter
- paper-boy, in pub
- Steven Singleton
- Seamus, in basement
- Kate Brailsford
- deaf boy's mum
- Luka Kennedy
- Fraser, deaf boy
- Helen Devon
- Jessica, woman in tube
- Josie Aitken Sheridan
- Duncan's baby
- Seamus Ball
- Father Fitzgerald
- Robert Carr
- Mr Litch, undertaker
- Jenny Swan
- Aunt Geraldine
- Certificate
- 18
- Distributor
- Downtown Pictures
- 9,142 feet
- 101 minutes 35 seconds
- Dolby digital
- In Colour