Featuring newcomer
whom the director first spotted fighting with her boyfriend on a train
station platform, the 17-year-old so completely captures the innocence,
cynicism and rage of a child of poverty and divorce on the edge of
adulthood that it feels as if you are spying on Mia, so achingly real,
so tangible does her world seem here.
“Fish Tank” has some of the same strains as
“Precious,” the dark fable of a pregnant, abused and obese Harlem
teenager on the current Oscar circuit, but without any of the
operatics. Arnold’s style is far more verite, giving us a precisely
rendered look at the experience of growing up in a British housing
project, with Mia’s issues emerging out of neglect and ignorance rather
than incest and violence, and the brilliant power of the film coming
from the gritty reality Arnold creates.
The director’s great talent is in telling stories of
the underclass and the kind of desperate desire for love and affection
that so-often comes packaged with that down-market life. She won an
Oscar in 2005 for “Wasp,” her short film about a near broken, single
mother, then a Cannes Jury Prize in 2006 for her feature “
The heart of the story is Mia, forced by
circumstance to grow up far too fast. Her 15 years have come with
virtually no breaks, that fish tank of poverty where entire lives are
played out swimming in circles. Disappointment piles up like the
clutter in the place she lives, decay does the decorating, the fridge
is always empty and the couch, and everyone on it, is worn to the bone.
Mia looks like a colt, long limbed and awkward even
inside the loose sweats she wears. So her passion for dancing — a kind
of freestyle hip-hop with lots of bump and grind mixed with gangsta
poses — comes as a surprise. Tenderness is rare, we see it with an
aging horse chained in a vacant lot that she wants to set free, and
like all the metaphors Arnold uses, as telling as it is understated.
Mostly, though, Mia’s head-butting her way through life — literally and
figuratively — alienated from girls her age, dropped out of school and
at war with her mom, Joanne (
It is a highly sexualized world where girls get
pregnant early and the cycle of children raising children continues.
You see the beginnings in the teenagers hanging around Mia’s apartment
complex, where bravado is foreplay and everyone is spoiling for sex or
a fight. And you see the second act in the boozy parties Joanne throws,
where Mia finds herself witness to what lust and liquor and loneliness
can do to virtual strangers.
Arnold, who wrote and directed here, again proves
remarkably facile at capturing society’s ills in dramatic form,
particularly the treacherous terrain that fatherless teenage girls
face. In “Fish Tank,” trouble comes in the form of Joanne’s new
boyfriend, Connor (
muscles and laughter. The problem, or one of them, is that Mia exists
in an ecosystem where sex is confused for love all the time.
The relationship between Connor and Mia develops in
many ways that you might expect, but in many more that you won’t.
Arnold adds new tangles to the web as the story plays out and in the
process says much about the prospects for young girls like Mia. She
also digs into the ways in which broken families can pretend to be
whole again — from girls tucked in at night to country picnics, things
neither Mia nor her younger sister have probably ever experienced and
you see both their hunger for it and fear of it in Mia’s eyes.
Arnold takes more than a few risks with her
characters, willing to let us loathe them as well as love them,
depending on the moment, unwilling to make it easy for either us or
them. Fassbender, whom you might know from his very funny turn as an
undercover agent who’s done in by a bad drink order in “Inglourious
Basterds” tavern scene, is excellent walking that tight-wire of dark
possibilities.
Though you can feel the heat of her anger, and the
pain of her disappointments, it is the shots of Mia alone that linger.
In a scene that runs through the film, she’s broken into a boarded up
apartment, its windows overlooking the despair below. It’s where she
dances, headphones dangling, moving slowly to music only she can hear,
it says everything about her isolation and her still flickering sense
of hope. It is moments like these that leave you as desperate as that
15-year-old that nothing will come along to extinguish that flame.
“Fish Tank”
MPAA rating: Unrated
Running time: 2 hours, 2 minutes
Playing: In selected theaters
—
(c) 2010, Los Angeles Times.
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