The film begins on a high.
Intercut with the opening credits, in close-ups, Ray (Ray Winstone)
orders drinks at a nightclub bar. He
carries the tray of drinks over to where his wife, Val (Kathy Burke), and
mother-in-law (Laila Morse) sit. Ray
spats with Val, but the words are nearly inaudible, drowned out by the club
din. He takes the remainder of the
drinks to a table of men on the other side of the club. Sitting down, Ray listens and contributes to a
series of crude anecdotes tossed around in this boy’s club.
DP, Ron Fortunato’s handheld camerawork gives the scene an
itchy, throbbing, intimacy, which moves to capture gestures as the men recount
stories – hands drawing the narrative, eyes exaggerated for maximum theatrical
effect, mouths contorted in laughter.
So far
, Nil By Mouth,
the only film by Gary Oldman
,
recalls John Cassavetes’ work, particularly
Husbands. The kineticism and macho-bonding is all
here in the first ten minutes.
Shortly
thereafter,
Nil’s mood changes a darker
shade, (and not the existential kind seen in
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie).
The revelry and exhilaration leak into the next day and
night. Billy (Charlie Creed-Miles),
Ray’s brother-in-law, tags along. The
festivities become rambunctious, more rowdy, as the gang moves from an arcade
to a strip-joint while taking drugs and an assortment of booze. Finally, the night ends with a beating; Ray
sucker punches a man who, in some way, did him wrong.
Back at home, after the night out, Billy shoots up with some
of Ray’s heroin, the dope dealer that he is.
The following morning, Ray looms over Billy, who’s still asleep. Ray erupts, thrashing Billy, screaming inches
away from his face, wanting to know where his supply is. The pressure that the film has been building
explodes. The film’s rhythm quickens to the tension as Ray, this hulking brute
of a figure, chomps on Billy’s nose.
Nil by Mouth
splits its focus on these two male figures of a working-class London
family.
It follows them when separate,
and, explosively, when together.
Indeed,
the film has what Adrian Martin calls a plateau narrative structure
- a
slow build to a confrontation of bodies, a gradual decline, and then onto the
next confrontation.
Like a vacuum,
Billy and Ray’s family get pulled into their problems.
Billy’s mother supports his drug addiction
monetarily.
In a drunken paranoia, Ray
batters Val, who happens to be pregnant.
With the domestic violence, Oldman appears to be in Kitchen
sink realism territory. But the film’s
aesthetic betrays such characteristics of that type of filmmaking. Along with
Cassavetes, Nil by Mouth is a heady
cocktail, blending the manic-energy of Alan Clarke’s social dramas and the
piss-yellow of Nan Goldin’s photography.
Oldman intermingles the uncomfortable intimacy, seen in the
extended opening, with distance. He
balances the near and the far by using glass, which is one of Nil by Mouth’s visual motifs. In Ray’s cramped apartment, for example, a
glass partition separates the living room and the kitchen. Fortunato often films the characters through
either side of the glass. It is like
looking through a microscope slide, observing this family entrapped in their
own private hell, which is ready to spill out into the public at any minute. “Oh, mum.
I just don’t want anyone knowing,” Val says, black and blue after Ray
batters her.
Now alone in the kitchen, Ray drinks, ranting to his
reflection in a mirror. The isolation
too much for him, Ray obliterates this glass cage, tossing furniture
around. Earlier, we see Ray sitting at
the kitchen table, watching a TV set that’s playing in the living room. On the glass, we see the faint image of the
program -- a family gathered around a dinner table, ideal domesticity.
In Billy, there’s an echo of Ray. He’s distant from his family, yet dragging
them down, financially, ethically, with his drug addiction. As with Ray, visual motifs of entrapment
correspond with Billy. Walking through
the hallway of a housing project, he’s seen in front of the vertical bars of a
door. He calls a drug dealer in a phone
booth. With his chums, he haunts a
launderette. We see him milling about
the space through the window – the equivalent of the glass partition.
Haven turns to prison when a knife-wielding man traps Billy and
his friend in the launderette. The next
scene, Billy’s in an actual prison cell.
Unlike Ray though, he’s comfortable in his isolation, shooting up a
smuggled stash of heroin. He’s free to
annihilate himself without involving his family.
With Billy locked away and Ray making amends with Val, one
wonders if this family has achieved stability or if this is merely a temporary
stasis for a chain of suffering that’s passed down, from male to male, through
generations.
