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Orphans, the new film
from writer-director Peter Mullan, begins with a long take of four siblings gathered
around their mother’s coffin on the night before her funeral. Awash in grief, and
self-conscious of their behavior in front of each other, they enact a simple goodbye
ceremony for the woman who bore them. A small marvel of discipline, it brings to mind the
beautiful closing scene in Big Night, as the actors are required to stay in
character while doing very little. Unfortunately, it’s also the most interesting and
heartfelt look we get at Mullan’s characters, even though the film still has some 95
minutes of running time.
Orphans follows these four
people as they stumble through a rainy night in Glasgow, each of them dealing with their
loss in their own different ways. Thomas (Gary Lewis), whose lifelong filial dutifulness
has bleached all the life out of him (even his skin looks like parchment), insists on
spending the night beside his mother’s body in the church. Michael (Douglas Henshall)
is stabbed in a pub brawl, and tries to survive without medical care until dawn when he
can fake an on-the-job injury for the workers’ comp. John (Stephen McCole), enraged
by Michael’s stabbing, passes the night looking for his brother’s attacker so
that he can take revenge. Sheila (Rosemarie Stevenson), who is confined to a wheelchair by
cerebral palsy, is taken in by a family of Good Samaritans (and drops out of the picture
for all practical purposes).
Mullan has created a wildly
uneven film, both in quality and in tone. On the one hand, he’s given it a Maxwell
Anderson stage-play atmosphere by having a metaphorical rainstorm engulf the city during
the night. On the other, he’s succumbed to the cry of the youth market sirens,
injecting violence and gross-out comedy where it doesn’t belong. A man ejaculating
into another man’s face, a bartender who imprisons disfavored patrons, a darts game
that uses a man’s rear side as its target – all this and more has been squeezed
into a movie that’s ostensibly about a family recovering from the death of its
mother. Who knows what imp began whispering into Mullan’s ear that a straight drama
would be too boring, too square, for these modern times? Whatever it is, he should track
it down and kill it, for it caused him to turn Orphans into a tart of a movie
that’s trying to please all comers.
One suspects that the siblings
take their separate paths during the stormy night not because the symbolism is apt, but
because Mullan knows that their conflicts aren’t sharp enough to come to a point. No
one in this bruised and battered tribe can ever surprise us because they’re nothing
but Christ figures. Suffering is their only attribute, and they’re each allotted a
Cross – a stab wound, or a wheelchair – which they drag through the entire
movie. Orphans is in one sense about paralysis, but its form reflects its content
in ways that ought to alarm its creator. In places it makes Long Day’s Journey Into Night look like Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Orphans shows some
talent, but it’s neither for violence nor family drama. It does have a handful of
lyric sequences that work beautifully. In one, Michael slides on a wooden pallet down a
long loading ramp and into the River Clyde, where he begins washing out with the tide; in
another, the storm tears the roof off the church, and the ensuing maelstrom suggests that
Thomas’ grief has brought on the apocalypse. Both scenes are shot and edited so well
that you wish Mullan had dropped all of the revenge plots and masturbating old men, and
stuck with this material that actually pulls some poetry out of his characters. It’s
too bad that Orphans is content to be a kitchen-sink drama that’s full of old
dishwater.
- Tom Block
