Darkness Rising

Our critic reviews the latest Harry Potter screen installment and Shane Meadows' "Somers Town."

The first extended dialogue scene in Shane Meadows’ lovely feature “Somers Town” finds a Polish-born construction worker named Marius (Ireneusz Czop) and his teenage son, a wannabe-photographer named Marek (Piotr Jagiello), making dinner in the kitchen of a tiny North London apartment, chatting about their days and trying out English curse words. The father tells the son he impressed his supervisor through an awesome display of strength, then holds up his bicep for inspection. The conversation turns to which nation has the strongest men. Marius tells his son about Geoff Capes, an English strongman who was famed for catching a bird, putting it in a metal cage and crushing it with his bare hands. “Was this Geoff Capes ever the world champion?” asks Marek. “I’m not sure,” his dad replies. “I don’t understand everything they say.”

It’s a small moment, one that seems on first glance to be little more than exposition disguised as observation (a rare thing in and of itself). But it’s exquisitely crafted — so astutely written, acted and shot (in a single medium-distance take) that it could nearly stand alone as an observational short. Meadows, screenwriter Paul Fraser and the film’s naturalistic (mostly nonprofessional) cast aren’t looking to flatten anybody with Sheer Dramatic Power. They’re mining the Light Mike Leigh vein and hauling out gems — like the scene set one day later in which another young man, Tomo (Thomas Turgoose), newly arrived from England and bloodied from a mugging, sits in a coffee shop opposite Jane (Kate Dickie), a woman who was nice to him on the train. “Can you loan me some money?” Tomo asks Jane. “I’ll buy you a train ticket,” she replies, pleasantly but firmly. “What if I pretended it was for a train ticket?” he counters. “You’ve got some cheek,” she says, and reaches for her purse.

After she leaves, Tomo moves over to a nearby table where Marek just happens to be sitting, somehow gets hold of Marek’s photos of a French waitress that he’s sweet on, asks if she’s a model or a porn star, then resists when Marek tries to take his pictures back. The counterman orders them to quit messing around, and the quick-witted Tomo tells him it’s no big deal because “We’re best mates.” The marvelous thing about that last line isn’t just that it confirms Tomo’s thick brand of cunning. It’s the film’s understanding that in bad times, we blurt out those sorts of sentiments because we need them to be true — and that if we get lucky and the wish comes true, a bad day becomes a good day.

True empathy is a rare sight in movies; “Somers Town” has it in spades. It’s there in the moment when Marek’s boss, a local hustler who sells folding chairs out of a storage locker, eyes the kid’s Manchester United jersey, warns him that people around here don’t like the team, then brings him an Arsenal one and orders him to put it on. It’s there in the deadpan way that Tomo tells Marek, who can’t stop looking at his French waitress portfolio, that “In England, there’s a tradition of the girlfriend to kiss her boyfriend, so it sounds like you’re not actually with her.” Most of all, it’s there in the atmospheric long shots of characters walking through the city, warm-blooded specks against concrete and steel. It’s not until you’ve absorbed many of these shots that you recall the father’s strongman spiel and realize it’s a metaphor for what modern life does to working people. These characters are birds in a steel cage, going about their daily routines knowing they could be crushed at any moment and thinking that maybe, if they’re lucky, it’ll happen tomorrow, so they can go out with their friends again tonight.

Meadows’ last film was the blistering skinhead drama “This Is England,” which costarred Turgoose as a baby-faced goon. This one seems like a palate cleanser — something sweet to follow something bitter. But even minor films can display major talent. “Somers Town”’s veneer of floppy-limbed ease is no less a performance than the ones presented by Meadow’s spot-on actors, who breeze through dialogue that sounds like a scripted/improvised hybrid while nailing tricky pauses with Greenwich Mean accuracy. The film’s seeming artlessness is artifice. “Somers Town” is plain truth.

Matt Zoller Seitz is our guest critic for the month of July.

“Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” is now open in wide release; “Somers Town” is now open in New York.

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