MOVIE REVIEW - "Submarine"

Quirky Submarine Charts an Entertaining Course

Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) has it all figured out. He’s filmed this movie about his life in his head a few thousand times, taken the Super 8 negative out of the camera editing it into the perfect cinematic coming of age super story. He will get the ultra peculiar and totally cool Jordana Bevan (Yasmin Paige) to notice him. He will save his parents Lloyd (Noah Taylor) and Jill’s (Sally Hawkins) marriage, keeping his mother away from the clutches of former flame and current New Age self-help guru Graham Purvis (Paddy Considine). And, most importantly, he will have sex before his fifteenth birthday, losing it to Jordana in a bit of romantic perfectionism worthy of the great love songs of the late twentieth century.



As descriptions go, I’m going to leave my one of British screenwriter and director Richard Ayoade’s Submarine right there because to say more, doesn’t so much ruin the surprise, but take the fun out of watching the filmmaker’s freewheeling, pessimistic yet oddly uplifting cinematic debut. Based on the popular novel by Joe Dunthorne, the movie doesn’t exactly rewrite the coming-of-age genre handbook. But it is made with energy, verve, vision and ingenuity, and while the places it goes and the lessons that are learned aren’t exactly a surprise discovering them is still plenty enjoyable.

The film is cast to perfection. All of the supporting players take their characters do some wonderful things with them, Taylor, Hawkins and Considine enlivening proceedings to such an extent you can almost imagine a motion picture revolving solely around them being nearly as satisfying as this one is. They lend glorious support, keeping relative newcomer Roberts focused and on his game, forcing him to rise to their level making Oliver a far more curiously intriguing introspective roustabout than he arguably would have been otherwise.

And rise to this challenge he does. In almost every scene, he is required to go places that aren’t altogether pleasing, do things that challenge the audience and take him to the precipice of loosing their sympathies. There are choices Oliver makes that had me shaking my head, annoyed and angered at him for his selfish stupidity. But thanks to Roberts I believed that these choices, while wrong, were made for reasons the character felt secure in. Better, and even more importantly, I believed he was learning from them, becoming a better person who would hopefully mature into something greater than the some of his parts thanks to these emotional and interpersonal failures.

At the same time, some of this does feel too familiar, bits and pieces right out of The Graduate meets Ferris Beuller’s Day Off meets Rushmore playbook. There were times when the movie frustratingly stops dead in its tracks, hinting at moving someplace interesting only to stutter and sidestep, going for the easy joke or the obvious visual instead. A third act bit of vandalism is oddly placed, while an early sequence involving teenage bullying went on longer than necessary while also coming to an unsatisfying resolution.

Yet I loved a lot of Submarine, got a kick out of the way Roberts and Paige played off one another, find happy satisfaction in the smooth icy-blue images Erik Wilson (The Hills Have Eyes). Composer Andrew Hewitt’s score mixes perfectly with former The Smith’s guitarist Johnny Marr’s original songs, the two finding a melodious symmetry that always seems to fit the tone and the attitude of the picture perfectly. The way it ended also couldn’t help but bring me to a smile, the last image so poetically open-ended I almost let out a contented sigh.

As debuts go, BBC television stalwart Ayoade has crafted a pretty darn good one. The dialogue is crisp, clean and inventive, while his script moves from place to place with a confident ease that obvious from the very start. Submarine may not be entirely original and might no go to places I haven’t visited before but that doesn’t mean I didn’t have a grand time watching it all the same. I got a great kick out of it, and the next time Ayoade decides to set sail I can’t wait to go aboard and come along for the ride.