Gary Oldman’s family drama is gruelling, compassionate and worth the difficult evening, with Ray Winstone frightening and Kathy Burke deeply moving. It runs a little long, and an explanatory speech does work the actors have already done.
Gary Oldman’s Nil by Mouth is a distressing, compassionate drama that we recommend with a firm warning about its domestic violence. Oldman writes and directs a south London family story in which alcoholism and abuse have become part of ordinary life. He is interested in the people who keep going within that household, including the women whose endurance is too easily taken for granted. The humour matters, too, because the family can still enjoy one another’s company.
Ray Winstone’s Ray is hard to watch without becoming tense, because his aggression seems so familiar to the people around him. Winstone frightened us. He makes Ray recognisable without asking us to make allowances for the damage he does. Oldman keeps Ray within the same family life that contains the jokes and the loyalty, so the violence never becomes a separate attraction.
Kathy Burke’s Valerie gives the film much of its warmth, and stops suffering from becoming the only thing we know about this family. Burke makes endurance look tiring, and never asks us to applaud it. Her performance is moving because Valerie remains somebody whose company might be enjoyable, even when her circumstances are appalling. Charlie Creed-Miles, Laila Morse and Edna Doré help make the family feel particular, rather than a group assembled to represent social problems. Oldman’s writing gives them humour and the sound of south London speech.
Ron Fortunato photographs the tower-block surroundings in pale, grainy images that make them feel inhospitable. The lighting is carefully judged, so the roughness of the images does not mean losing sight of the people. Hugo Luczyc-Wyhowski’s production design makes the homes convincing without turning every room into a display of deprivation. The domestic spaces feel cramped by the people sharing them. That sense of enforced company makes the scenes at home harder to sit through.
Brad Fuller’s editing gives the performances room, although at 128 minutes the film sometimes makes the family’s exhaustion too much our own. We begin to feel the length once the misery has been firmly established, and further time in it does not always deepen our understanding. Eric Clapton’s music adds feeling that the voices have already supplied, and we could have done with less of that assistance. The dialogue can be painful enough on its own, even when the humour gives us a moment’s relief.
Oldman is less sure when he explains his characters, and one explanatory monologue briefly makes the writing too insistent. It tells us how to understand behaviour that the acting has already made intelligible. This is a small weakness in a social-realist drama that generally trusts people to be inconsistent, abrasive and still worth caring about. Its attention to the women’s endurance is especially valuable, because their lives remain important beyond what they reveal about the men.
The domestic abuse makes this a difficult choice for a shared evening, however much we admire the acting. It deserves the time, but there is no need to pretend that being willing to watch it is a test of seriousness. Leave a little quiet afterwards.
