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Happy New Year, Colin Burstead (Ben Wheatley, 2018)
🕑 Added 2019-01-04 01:37:50 +0000 UTC
Ashamed as I am to admit it, I have always liked the idea of Ben Wheatley more that I've liked his films. He is just the sort of shot in the arm that the British film industry needs, a young independent upstart with a sensibility that is equal parts arthouse and grindhouse, unafraid to work in the too-often forgotten corners of British cinema history -- the horror films, the "Plays for Today," the backlot cheapies. But I've always found myself at odds with his sensibility. The combination of seemingly unlike genres, or the mimicry of older, underappreciated models, has felt too studied and theoretical. For work that is often so bloody, Wheatley's films have struck me as rather sterile, although never less than intelligent.
My opinion changed, somewhat, with High Rise, a film that disappointed some. Adapting J.G. Ballard actually gave Wheatley a measure of freedom, since as an adaptation it was required to accomplish certain things. The film quite nicely combined the 1970s mod style of living with a touch of the dystopian future, resulting in something that struck me as equal parts Kubrick and Roeg. It also benefited from its rather compact spatial organization. People moved (or fell, or were pushed) up or down, but the tower remained the focal point. It was, in certain respects, Snowpiercer going vertically.
I was skeptical at first about Happy New Year, Colin Burstead, because it operates within what has become one of my least favorite contemporary genres, the family-gathering film. Tensions simmer, secrets are divulged, there is a moment of reckoning, family ultimately triumphs... Often these films are set at the holidays. If Thomas Vinterberg's The Celebration is the Grade-A ur-text for this sort of movie, The Family Stone is its nadir, with Pablo Trapero's Rolling Family a close second.
But for the most part, HNYCB works. Part of it has to do with its construction. All of the family crises are ancillary to one major problem -- the return after five years' absence of David (Sam Riley), they youngest of the Burstead children and the one who cheated on his wife and then left her and their kids for pastures new. The daughter, Gini (Hayley Squires) invited him as a surprise for their sometimes-ailing, always-melodramatic mother (Doon Mackichan), without consulting with Colin (Neil Maskell) or, more damningly, David's ex-wife Paula (Sarah Baxendale), who is still very much in the family fold.
Wheatley co-scripted this film with the actors, and there is undoubtedly an early Mike Leigh feeling to HNYCB, a sense of freedom and openness to both the performances and the camerawork. The film hits a climax at its midpoint, a kind of satisfying catharsis for the viewer, which the rest of the film focuses almost exclusively on taking back. This realignment of priorities, and our sense of who we should be "rooting for," is clever indeed, since it reminds us that in family squabbles, nothing is as cut and dried as it may seem.
I won't lie. Part of why this film both attracted and repulsed me is because of complex issues happening in my own family at the moment. My mother has been charged with caring for her 92 year old father in her own home, after her sister simply bailed on the job. Meanwhile, my aunt is siphoning off my grandfather's pension and Social Security. She is stealing from an old man so she doesn't have to work. I would love to go Full Colin on my wretched aunt, but in watching HNYCB, I had to acknowledge, it would accomplish nothing. Diplomacy, and being the one watching and plotting in the corner, always win out over the frontal attack. Mr. Wheatley taught me something about my own life, and family in general. I guess we're starting 2019 off on the right foot.
