This is absolutely not the type of thing I wanted to write about in the first proper post here. Unfortunately it’s the first thing that I’ve wanted to talk about since the site’s been up and running. I hate Filth starring James McAvoy. I swear to god I’m not one of these angry reviewers that hates everything……….usually. Seriously though it’s been awhile since a movie rubbed me the wrong way like this. I’ll often dislike a movie and enjoy dressing it down but this is something different.
Filth is the kind of movie your male friends from high school misinterpret but at the same time you’re not entirely sure if they are. Meaning, it’s hard to definitively say that Jon S. Baird (writer/director) is writing a sad story about an irredeemable person fraught with trauma or if said trauma is just an excuse for sweaty male viewers to “lol” at all the fucked up shit that Detective Bruce Roberts gets into.
A tidy summary of this movie (spoilers out the ass) is that James McAvoy is trying to get a promotion at the police station he works at while also seriously fucking with everyone he works with and ruining their chances to help his own. When I say “fucking with” I don’t mean like when Jim put Dwight’s stapler in Jell-O. I mean outing someone as gay in front of all their coworkers or sending his supposed friend to jail by framing him for prank calls that McAvoy himself is making. These calls also allow McAvoy to gaslight and fuck his friend’s wife. Oh, and McAvoy’s character also forces an underage girl to give him a blow job (after chastising her for being underage, no less).
Now given that we’re all familiar with the anti-hero archetype it should be apparent by now: this ain’t it, and that’s the problem with this movie. It doesn’t work because Roberts is such a piece of shit that it very quickly becomes difficult to empathize with whatever’s going on with him that’s causing this abominable behavior. The movie also does its best to muck this up on its own. The pacing and revealing of information is laid out far too late, so any sympathy we might have for Roberts should be too little, too late. For most of the movie we know his wife and kid left him and about midway through we learn that his little brother died at a young age and Roberts blames himself. Is that enough to justify forced statutory rape among other things? Hell no. That’s way too much.
The style of the movie play out like a 15-year-old watched Fight Club and any Guy Ritchie movie and then set out to make his own. McAvoy actually does a great job and the rest of the cast is pretty good to in my opinion. The characters are vivid and distinct both in writing and performance. The movie isn’t a total loss. It just reeks of those films a dude watches and tells you it “rules” without understanding it, and that’s much of the movie’s fault in this case. Most iMDB reviews seem to get the fact that this is a guy in pain who is giving up, which is a relief, but the movie waits to long to show us its hand. For the vast majority of the run time McAvoy is just being a terrible person whose antics would only be enjoyed by sick people you wouldn’t want to hang out with.
You can do worse than being influenced by Fincher and Ritchie. The movie even has a bunch of Terry Gilliam-esque dream sequences/visions. Baird at least knows who to borrow from, but it all comes off as a cheap facsimile found in a DVD bargain bin. There are stylish elements here, they just don’t amount to something that’s all that cohesive. I would also argue that a main plot is extremely murky if non-existent in most scenes. McAvoy successfully carries the movie and it does try very hard to have a vibe that keeps you engaged. Unfortunately the writing goes way too far and forgets that although protagonists are not necessarily heroes, we need something about them that makes us want to watch them. A protag treating everyone like garbage for reasons to be revealed later is not enough. It just makes the viewer feel like crap.
The other issue at play here is the phenomenon where a white male character’s sins are plastered over and forgiven “because trauma”. Roberts decides he’s a lost cause, which is an interesting angle for a trouble character, but the movie waits until the last 20 minutes to hit us with any of that. This is accompanied by a fairly unbelievable twist that’s less shocking than it is “huh?”. By the end I could at least see where Baird was going with this, but I put off finishing it and watched most of the film in small chunks here and there over a period of weeks, and it’s only 97 minutes long! I admit that isn’t the optimal viewing experience but I also don’t feel the need to apologize for feeling deflated and unenthusiastic when I’m asked to watch another hour-plus of a fictional child rapist who hurts everyone around him with a smile on his face. Failed redemption stories are interesting, but you can’t just have evil run up the scoreboard and then forget it all happened when a little self-pity is thrown on top. Avoid this one.
