Submarine | Review

British writer-director Richard Ayoade’s indie coming-of-age dramedy Submarine sporadically descends into the darker depths of true adolescent volatility, but ultimately surfaces in the safe harbor of fanciful quirkiness. Ayoade’s promising, but overly familiar feature debut (based on a novel by Joe Dunthorne) follows the self-dramatizing teenager Oliver Tate as he struggles to keep his parents’ marriage together while also trying to lose his virginity. Attempting to portray affectation, the movie itself falls prey to the affliction with an over-reliance on moody music cues, fussy framings, capsule cutaways, and glib voice-over. Paddy Considine gets some laughs but is underused as Oliver’s ludicrous “mystic” neighbor; Yasmin Paige gives the most grounded, affecting performance as the brash, bitter object of Oliver’s desire. “Why are you such a dick?” she asks him at one point; the movie falters because it doesn’t have the guts to actually make him one.

Though played earnestly by Craig Roberts, Oliver is never more than just an outline of a person. He self-narrates the audience through a series of high-school misfit misadventures (unintentionally contributing to the humiliation of an unpopular girl; getting beat up as a consequence of a profession of love), while trying to keep his parents’ marriage from rupturing due to his mother’s apparent infatuation with an old high-school suitor. As he starts to earn the hesitant affections of the emotionally guarded Jordana, he seems to sabotage his own progress at every turn. Can Oliver crack through the armor of his self-absorption and think about someone else’s pain for a change?

As Oliver’s gloomy father, Noah Taylor (the star of 1991’s ‘Flirting,’ a far superior movie in this genre) has a face full of deep crags like Brighton cliffs slashed by a winter of rough seas; he is now in prime condition to be cast and gruesomely murdered in a Nick Cave/John Hillcoat collaboration. The charming and spirited Sally Hawkins continues a disconcerting trend of playing dour, graying, emotionally cordoned-off wives (see also her unfortunate appearance in the awful ‘Jane Eyre’). She struggles to make sense of Oliver’s unconvincingly oblivious mother, whose attraction to the fatuous New-Age guru Graham (played by Considine) never scans.

Considine gives us a few fleeting glimpses at the desperation behind Graham’s confident facade, but we never get a satisfying exploration of the vulnerabilities and doubts that drive him into the cocoon of his illusions, which would work to humanize him. Nor do we see an alternative representation of spirituality or sincere theological inquiry. Instead, in accordance with the default settings of so much of contemporary culture, this most fundamental of human impulses is superficially condemned into caricature — predatory, clownish and nothing else.

The defense mechanisms used by Oliver to keep himself emotionally disengaged from Jordana (most keenly revealed in one of the movie’s best scenes, where Oliver compulsively finds excuses not to accompany her to the hospital to visit her dying mother), are echoed in the distancing tactics used by Ayoade in the movie itself. Everything from breaking up the movie into chapters (titles rendered in trendy fonts) to faux-New Wave montages, to doubling-up on visual information with unnecessary voice-over (for instance, as Hawkins and Considine leave a restaurant together and enter his crystal-covered van, Oliver announces to the viewer: “It seems dear Mom is having an affair.”), all provide escapism, not for the audience into the movie, but for the movie away from itself.

Rating 2.5 stars