Young Adam Release Date: April 16, 2004 Starring: Ewan McGregor, Tilda Swinton, Emily Mortimer Directed by: David Mackenzie GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (published 4/16/04)
The chilly moisture that gets caught between your clothes and your skin on a fog-shrouded late winter’s day—the opening scenes of Young Adam, in which bargemen Joe (Ewan McGregor) and Les (Peter Mullan) discover a dead woman’s body floating in the water, are so suffused with that feeling that viewers might start to shiver themselves. Like his fellow Scot, director Lynne Ramsay, David Mackenzie has a real knack for orchestrating imagery, sound, and performance to produce almost tactile effects. And while Young Adam isn’t as galvanizing as Ramsay’s Ratcatcher or the ineffable Morvern Callar, it’s rich enough in atmosphere to make you almost buy the quasi-allegorical absurdities (note, please, the film’s title, and note also that there’s no character named Adam in the movie) of its story line. Joe, as it happens, has a little history with the woman whose body they find; she’s Cathie, a former lover (played by Emily Mortimer). This isn’t clear as Joe and Les notify the authorities and take off in the barge, which is also inhabited by Les’s wife, Ella (Tilda Swinton), and their small child, Jim. Boy, the sexual tension in the hold of that barge is so thick you could cut it with a penis—and so, true to the privates-baring rep he’s cultivated in just about all of his films save the Star Wars ones (no light saber jokes, please), Ewan does—or rather, his character does, and soon Joe and Ella are indulging in marathons of sex that Mackenzie, true to his métier, imbues with a single-malt-scotch warm, slightly clammy feel. (Think a sip of 15-year-old Laphroaig.) Subsequent plot developments include impotent Les’s discovery of his cuckolding, and the arrest of an innocent man in Cathie’s death . . . but all told, this is hardly a plot-driven exercise. In adapting the first novel by Scottish quasi-Beat Alexander Trocchi (one of those types who, on the road to literary cultdom, seems to have met every more famous littérateur of his and prior generations), Mackenzie makes his own life a whole lot harder by completely eschewing the book’s first-person narration, which is all, like, existential and stuff. (Sample passage: “Confess? In practice I knew it would prove fatal to me. In principle it would have been in an indirect but very fundamental way to affirm the validity of the particular social structure I wished to deny.”) I gather the intention was to find cinematic correlatives to Joe’s stated perspective. Very ambitious, but Mackenzie has most of his success on the barge—you don’t just follow the motions of McGregor and Swinton’s sex scenes, you almost intuit what they’re thinking. Once Joe goes on dry land to face a new dilemma, the movie itself kind of dries up, and Mackenzie’s follow-through on the conceit that this character is literally irresistible to women gets a bit risible. Still, there’s more than enough done right here for moviegoers starved of nuance to savor (not least of which is the enigmatic score, concocted by David Byrne and played by members of some of Scotland’s most intriguing bands, including the Delgados and Mogwai), and I’m much looking forward to seeing how Mackenzie, in his upcoming film, tackles Patrick McGrath’s Asylum.
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