August 2: Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1974 (2009 -- Julian Jarrold)

★★★

This movie was a lot better than I expected.  There’s a tone I often see in British crime cinema, a gritty, bone-chilling ruthlessness that heightens tension because the bad guys really will do anything.  And there’s nothing elegant about them either – they’re middle class or lower middle class folk with bad taste, puffy faces and a stubborn lack of interest in anything not material.  This grittiness, which informs not only the characters but the dialog, setting and action, drains any larger concerns from the film.

Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1974 is firmly in this line of British crime movies as the slightly vulnerable/slightly incompetent young Eddie Dunford discovers and walks into the grinder that the Yorkshire police operate.  It’s a land of smoky, tacky interiors with cheap furnishings and lighting that is sharp and unflattering.  There’s no beauty in the sets of the film, and there are no limits to what the bad guys are capable of.  The atmosphere is relentless, and it’s one of the strong points of the film.

I liked the way it was filmed, too.  The first of a trilogy made for British TV, Red Riding 1974 has a fluid camera that gives the impression of actually being with the action.  It might move from the face to the collar of the actor’s shirt or linger in a room after a character has walked out.  With the desaturated images and the meandering camera, you get a sense of almost participating in the action (if not occasionally of watching TV).

The acting is uniformly good, too.  In fact, I spent the first few minutes of the film thinking of Dog Day Afternoon and wondering if the film had actually been made in 1974.  The actor playing Eddie looked familiar and it wasn’t until I recognized him as Andrew Garfield from The Social Network that I got that this was a recent movie.  It was certainly looking very prescient…..

Red Riding 1974 is an excellent, smart, hard movie, suggesting Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in tone but not relying on Nazis.  Film noir is alive here.  I’m hooked and want to see the second installment of the trilogy to see how that director uses the actors and the setting.