Mackenzie goes to a dark place in the human heart.
Director/screenwriter David Mackenzie creates an engaging, slow-paced affair shrouded in a solvent full of mystery. This grimly bleak portrait unravels a story that is ugliest at the core and which is soaked with a fatalistic atmosphere of despair.
Opening with a sequence showing a dead body fished out of Scottish waters, Young Adam is layered in emotional and personal catastrophes. It’s a literally stripped bare 1950’s portrait of a brutish vagabond named Joe, impeccably played by Ewan McGregor (Big Fish) whose character lets the viewer know that this might not be his first encounter with the stiff. The young man of not many words lives off and labors on a barge, his blackened skin from working with coal facilitates the notion that he might be covering up his past. His life on a boat experience with a small family of three is anything but normal. The chap fancies the ladies, to the point that he often finds himself with his pants below his knees. Ella played by Tilda Swinton (The Statement) has a torrid affair with him, when her bearded-beer drinking husband (Peter Mullan – The Magdalene Sisters) finds out; the once so-called happy life is destroyed. Joe is a brut, uses his lightsaber in numerous sexcapdes to fill his void, and betrays almost everyone he encounters. The film’s defined narrative progression and the series of flashbacks not only explains the nature of the ocean-floor shots displaying a type writer but also displays the links the newspaper headlines with the origin about the girl whose name begins with a C.
Images sometimes speak louder the words. In this case, director of photography Giles Nuttgens (The Deep End) adds a familiar working class color scheme as recently evoked in Cronenberg’s Spider to the text adapted from Alexander Trocchi’s classic novel. Powerful close-up shots and the choice for locals especially on the barge texturizes the images giving the entire film a very noir appeal that emphasizes the protagonist’s frame of mind. McGregor plays a complicated, demanding role, he is a womanizer who treats women as objects, and he is selfish to the degree that he has not remorse for the destruction he causes. This is particularly felt in the controversial NC-17 scene that depicts an emotionally vague hot-dog dressings sex-scene that borders on humiliation and a semi-rough erotic charge.
Young Adam is a hard watch because it’s emotional distant and serves a main character that is truly ugly to watch. Supported by David Byrne’s grief-stricken score, Mackenzie’s script is unrelenting in its unempathetic design but is perhaps the most totally validating watch on human condition this year.
