July 14: Shallow Grave (1994 -- Danny Boyle)

★★★★
It’s the visuals that strike you from the very opening of Shallow Grave.  The film cuts rapidly among a series of interviews of potential housemates, and we see primary-colored walls and furnishings as MTV style cuts create the story of the interviews and establish the characters: Alex, the over-the-top extrovert; David, the very bland accountant, and Juliet, the young doctor.  And the film continues throughout with this striking editing, like the scene after Alex and Juliet have gone shopping and are celebrating in the apartment, and great images, many of which are noir-influenced like the shafts of stabbing into the attic.  Shallow Grave is a film in love with look, and it’s so creative that that aspect alone would make it worthwhile.

But it goes beyond the look into a tone that it clearly owes to the first Coen Bros feature, Blood Simple.  Coen Bros films often look evil right in the eye, see it in an everyday vocabulary, and fail to understand it.  Coen Bros evil is horrible, implacable and utterly immoral, the evil that Flannery O’Connor saw through her Catholic lens, and Danny Boyle draws from this version of evil in Shallow Grave.  We see the graphically-beautiful death by drug overdose of Hugo, the horrible violence that the two gang members visit on rivals, and the grisly dismemberments that our own accountant undertakes.  And if the link to Blood Simple isn’t clear from the tone, it’s impossible to ignore the clear parallel between the scene of Alex being pinned to the floor with a knife through his shoulder and the scene in Blood Simple when Abby nails Visser’s hand to the window sill with a knife.

But despite the clear link between Shallow Grave and Blood Simple, the two are going at different things.  While the Coens have a philosophical bent and look at the nature of good and evil, Boyle is more interested in personalities and in film noir.  After the roommates decide early in the movie to keep the money, their personalities and relationships begin to diverge.  Inhibitions gone, David becomes a violent murderer, and Juliet morphs into a femme fatale who walks away with the money after bringing down the two men.  Alex alone rolls with the punches , remaining the trickster, willing to break social mores from the beginning of the film to the end.  And like a typical trickster, he sneaks away with something a victory. This isn’t a philosophical movie but rather one about personalities.

After watching this film, I’m still not sure what to make of Danny Boyle as an auteur filmmaker.  His output is eclectic, varying from this to Sunshine to Slumdog Millionaire, but I have trouble seeing cohesion in his work the same way I sense it in Soderbergh’s, for example.  Steven Soderbergh works in a wide range of genres and budgets, but I’m always aware of an intellectual engagement with his material, an unfailing sense of film language, and an effort to reach for something a little unique.  In Danny Boyle, though, I feel like he’s doing what he’s hired for, bringing some technique and embellishment to each project but not projecting a distinct approach to his film.  It’s the same sense I get from Ridley Scott’s work, much of which I enjoy despite not seeing a particular view of the world in it.

But auteur or not, Boyles created not only a visual treat, but a fun narrative ride in this first film.