Complicity
UK 1999
Reviewed by Kim Newman
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
Scotland. After the murder of the Caledonian newspaper's proprietor Sir Toby McCormack, Cameron Colley, a journalist on the newspaper, is under a cloud because of rashly expressed left-wing views. He is receiving tips from a source who calls himself Archer who hints at connections between an arms-trading scandal and a series of murders of establishment figures who have used their power to shield them from the consequences of their unethical business practices. Cameron is having an affair with childhood friend Yvonne, wife of amiable Tory businessman William, and reflects on his relationship with his other long-time friends, Andy and Claire Gould.
Andy has benefited hugely from William's buy-out of his business and gone to ground in a crumbling mansion, while his sister Claire, an unconventional drop-out, died some time ago after an inept locum doctor prescribed paracetamol for a heart attack. When a down-sizing whisky tycoon is drowned in his own product and a weapons dealer is literally disarmed, the police haul Cameron in for questioning and tell him that a burned body identified as Andy has been found. Cameron reveals to Detective Chief Inspector McDunn that when they were children he and Andy were attacked by a paedophile tramp; Cameron knocked the man out as he was molesting Andy who then killed the tramp. Cameron works out that Andy, who has faked his own death, is Archer, the murderer. Andy then kills both the doctor who misdiagnosed Claire and William, who was laundering money through his old company. Then Cameron is kidnapped by Andy. After explaining his motives, Andy lets his friend go, accepting his complicity in both the evils of society and his murderous reaction to them.
Review
Most of Gavin Millar's directorial credits have been vaguely literary and resolutely televisual (the theatrically released Dreamchild and Danny the Champion of the World were hybrid ventures that worked just as well on the small screen as on the big). His first stab at novelist Iain Banks, author of Complicity, was a superior four-part BBC television serial based on The Crow Road. In this follow-up, which had a theatrical release in Scotland but is a direct-to-video item in the rest of the UK, a transitional fade half way through suggests it might originally have been scripted as a television two-parter. This, as much as Millar's innate good taste, would explain the toning-down of the book's graphic violence (which at times reads like passages from American Psycho) as the "fitting punishment" murders committed by an unseen vigilante, whom the police suspect is journalist Cameron Colley, are reduced to almost throwaway flashes.
There are stretches of kinky sex courtesy of Yvonne, who gets Cameron to fulfil rape and bondage fantasies, and horror images which bring to mind Seven when an arms dealer is found with limbs cut off and an incompetent doctor dissected and displayed in an Edinburgh shop window. But the film still feels like a polite, careful literary adaptation, which ironically disarms much of the book's calculated disreputability. Jonny Lee Miller's Cameron dutifully chain-smokes, snorts coke, plays violent video games and screws his friend's wife, but the boyish actor is too clean a presence to suggest his character actually enjoys any of this, which sets him up too easily to be the moral arbiter of the climax.
The novel switches its narrative address between first and second person to blur the identity of Cameron and the killer, but the film can only set its protagonist up as a conventional 'wrong man', framed by the murderer and suspected by the cops. The somewhat obvious late-in-the-day flashback that reveals the childhood trauma which set the killer on his road to mass murder is also a variant on the old Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) gambit in which two young friends grow up on different sides of the law because one can run faster than the other.
The novel was published in 1993, and is imbued with the preceding decade and a half of Scottish politics, with the Conservatives as the arch villains ("Tories are bad" is the only argument Cameron feels he needs to make when challenged by William and Andy, who have just voted to re-elect Margaret Thatcher). The film updates the action by a few years, with diehard Conservative supporter William's strategic contribution to both major political parties hinting at New Labour's imminent success. Though the background of social conflict, which for Banks is a political rather than a national issue, is revived with conviction, the grounding of the personal fable in the scandals of the recent past (arms to Iraq, money-laundering) gives the film a curiously dated air (there's conspicuously no mention of the Scottish Nationalists, the National Assembly or even Europe). Wasting Bill Paterson and Brian Cox in conventional roles, Millar casts Trainspotting refugee Miller as the lead. But he shies away from the apt, if disreputable approach Danny Boyle might have taken to the interesting material.
Credits
- Director
- Gavin Millar
- Producers
- Richard Jackson
- Neil Dunn
- Screenplay
- Bryan Elsley
- Based on the novel by
- Iain Banks
- Director of Photography
- David Odd
- Editor
- Angus Newton
- Production Designer
- Jamie Leonard
- Music/Orchestrations
- Colin Towns
- ©Complicity Productions Limited
- Production Companies
- Carlton Films presents
- in association with the Scottish Arts Council National Lottery Fund a Talisman production Developed with the assistance of British Screen Finance Ltd
- Executive Producers
- Julia Palau
- Michael Ryan
- Co-producers
- Andrew Warren
- Peter McAleese
- Production Associate
- Anna Sofroniou
- Production Co-ordinator
- Karen McLuskey
- Production Manager
- Brian Kaczynski
- Location Manager
- Janet Riddoch
- Post-production
- Supervisor:
- Maria Walker
- Co-ordinator:
- Fleur Fontaine
- Assistant Directors
- Tommy Gormley
- Sarah Purser
- Mark Murdoch
- Additional:
- David Gilchrist
- Alison Goring
- Michael Queen
- Script Supervisors
- Libbie Barr
- Additional:
- Elizabeth Sherry
- Casting Director
- Susie Bruffin
- Additional Photography
- John Else
- Camera Operators
- Additional:
- Lewis Foster
- Aerial:
- Jeremy Braben
- Steadicam Operator
- Jan Pester
- Special Effects
- Effects Associates
- Firepower
- Graphics Consultant
- Adam Piggot
- Supervising Art Director
- Paul Kirby
- Costume Designer
- Kate Carin
- Costume Supervisor
- Amanda Craze
- Wardrobe Mistress
- Dena Thanopoulos
- Chief Make-up/Hair Designer
- Jenny Shircore
- Make-up Artists
- Nuala Conway
- Additional:
- Caroline Hamilton
- Elaine Coburn
- Samantha Print
- Fiona Maynard
- Sarah Kramer
- Catherine Muir
- Prosthetics Effects
- Animated Extras
- Titles/Opticals
- General Screen Enterprises
- Music Performed by
- Orchestra of London
- Tenor Saxophone
- Tommy Smith
- Soundtrack
- "Ball" - Craig Armstrong; "Denial", "Paperboat" - Gramophone; "Beautiful Day" - 3 Colours Red; "Groovy Train" - The Farm; "Freeman Hardy & Willis Acid" - Squarepusher; "Lochaber No More"; "Stay Focused" - awayTeam featuring Solid Rox; "Different Kind of Blue" - Gay Dad; "Pumping on the Stereo" - Supergrass; "Rocks" - Primal Scream; "Straight to Hell" - The Clash
- Production Sound Mixer
- Colin Nicolson
- Additional Sound Recordist
- Alan Brereton
- Recordist
- Jamie Karsai
- Re-recording Mixer
- Craig Irving
- Dialogue Editor
- Colin Ritchie
- Effects Editor
- Richard Fettes
- ADR
- Mixer:
- John Bateman
- Editor:
- Colin Ritchie
- Foley
- Artists:
- Peter Burgess
- Andie Derrick
- Mixer:
- John Bateman
- Editor:
- Robert Gavin
- Additional Editor:
- Gordon Greenaway
- Stunt Co-ordinator
- Peter Brayham
- Armourer
- Bernard Shepherd
- Animals
- Creature Feature
- Helicopter Pilots
- Dominic Lawlor
- John Constable
- Cast
- Jonny Lee Miller
- Cameron Colley
- Brian Cox
- DCI McDunn
- Keeley Hawes
- Yvonne
- Paul Higgins
- Andy Gould
- Jason Hetherington
- William
- Bill Paterson
- Wallace Byatt
- Samuel West
- Neil
- Laura Ellis
- McCormack's mistress
- Alan Sinclair
- Sir Toby McCormack
- Alex Norton
- Kenny Garnet
- Valerie Edmond
- Josephine Boyle
- Paul Young
- Frank
- Katy Hale
- librarian
- Alex Purves
- Persimmon
- Rachael Stirling
- Claire Gould
- John Murtagh
- Norrie
- Michael MacKenzie
- Baine
- Julie Austin
- distillery secretary
- Stephen McCole
- Al
- David Kerr
- young Cameron
- Richard Madden
- young Andy
- Stephanie Boyle
- young Yvonne
- Laura O'Donnell
- young Claire
- Jackie Farrell
- security man
- Andy Gray
- DS Flavell
- Graham De Banzie
- Archie McLeod
- Gary McCormack
- Howie
- David Gallacher
- country policeman
- Joseph Accerelli
- Azul
- Gordon Munro
- Ford Kiernan
- interrogators
- William Macbain
- molester
- Carter Ferguson
- armed policeman
- Lucy McLellan
- policeman
- Certificate
- 18
- Distributor
- Entertainment Film Distributors Ltd
- 8,996 feet
- 99 minutes 58 seconds
- Dolby digital
- Colour by
- DeLuxe