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ONCE
UPON A TIME IN THE MIDLANDS
2/10
UK 2002 : Shane Meadows : 104 mins
Garage-owner Dek (Rhys Ifans) lives in a quiet street in a Nottinghamshire suburb
with his girlfriend Shirley (Shirley Henderson) and 12-year-old Marlene
(Finn Atkins), Shirley’s daughter from her earlier marriage to small-time
Glasgow criminal Jimmy (Robert Carlyle). Dek proposes marriage to Shirley
live on national TV – but she turns him down, and their relationship is
placed under further strain when Jimmy unexpectedly arrives on the scene,
on the run after a robbery and keen to displace Dek in the affections
of Shirley and Marlene. Across the road, meanwhile, live Jimmy’s foster-sister
Carol (Kathy Burke) and her husband Charlie (Ricky Tomlinson) – known
as ‘Nashville Charlie’, a country-and-western nut who performs ‘tribute’
material to his musical heroes at the local working men’s club.
 Meadows
is clearly a talented director – the handling of child actors is a reliable
litmus test for directorial skill, and he passes it with honours: Atkins
follows in the footsteps of the remarkable Andrew Shim from Meadows’ last
film, A Room For Romeo Brass.
But his script-writing is another matter entirely. Romeo Brass
was effective as an edgy, dark drama, but fell woefully flat when it tried
to be comic – with this followup, Meadows has taken the disastrous move
of emphasising the comedy at the expense of the drama, and he simply isn’t
up to the task.
A depressing compendium of tired jokes and undeveloped ideas, Midlands feels
like a pilot for a very bad sitcom – not least because, in a nod to classics
of that small-screen genre like Are You Being Served? and Hi-de-Hi,
the end picture-credits are preceded by a caption that reads ‘You
have been watching.’ Even the title is a misfire – surely Once Upon
a Time in the West Midlands would have been a funnier twist
on Sergio Leone’s original. But Meadows sets all of his work in his own
back-yard of Nottinghamshire, which is, slightly over to the east side
of the country.
It’s never explained, however, why there are so few locals on view – of the
main cast, only Shirley and Marlene speak with anything like Nottinghamshire
accents, and it’s perhaps no coincidence that these are the two characterisations
which avoid predictable stereotyping. Because Meadows’ deployment of his
big-name Brit actors is quite stunningly unimaginative: Carlyle, Burke
and Tomlinson adhering rigidly to their established screen personas.
Given the circumstances, they do as well as can be expected with their underwritten
roles – but Meadows allows Ifans to zoom embarrassingly over the top into
caricature as Welsh milquetoast Dek. Just as Romeo Brass
featured a character obsessed with buses, Dek is fanatical about cars
– he wears vile driving gloves, calls his vehicle ‘Baby’, and subscribes
to Classic Ford magazine – and it’s a thoroughly lazy, depressingly cliched
kind of ‘funny’ characterisation, sadly typical of Meadows’ general off-target
approach.
His dialogue lurches from bad to worse – at one point, Dek ticks off Jimmy with
the line “Take your new gay haircut and flip off!”, to which Carol
retorts “You can talk, peanut head!”, while the closure of the local pit
is dismissed in only the briefest of glib asides. Midlands thus
joins a depressingly long line of patronising, mirthless ‘comedies’ based
around British working-class life, a roll of bleak dishonour that includes
Purely Belter, Brassed
Off and House! Such
films bear the same relation to the likes of Mike Leigh’s All Or Nothing,
Amber’s Like Father
or Peter Kay’s small-screen Phoenix Nights as Charlie’s bad-karaoke
renditions do to the Nashville originals, every mangled note ringing as
false as a $3 bill.
26th August 2002
(seen 20th, Cameo Edinburgh – Edinburgh
Film Festival)
For all the
reviews from the 2002 Edinburgh Film Festival
click here.
For other
films rated 1/10 and 2/10 check out our Diorama
of Dishonour.
by Neil
Young
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