THE WAR ZONE (1999)
"You just want everything to be sweet and nice, and it isn't."
3.5 out of ****
Starring Ray Winstone, Lara Belmont, Freddie Cunliffe, Tilda Swinton;
Directed by Tim Roth;
Written by Alexander Stuart, from his novel;
Cinematography by Seamus McGarvey;
There is never a moment when we do not suspect something is wrong. The household is filled with silences and shadows. Family members talk to each other, but there is an underlying tension. The teenaged son and daughter are sullen and withdrawn--which is perfectly acceptable teenaged behaviour, but here seems excessive and disturbing. Outside their solitary house in Devonshire, the lowering clouds are ominous and oppressive, and the grey sea crashes against the black rocks of the shore. All is bleak.
In sunlight, it would be merely a pretty and peaceful swathe of the English coast, but there is no sunlight in THE WAR ZONE, Tim Roth's masterful directorial debut. The cliché says that all actors really want to be directors, even though most of them should be content with acting. Roth, on the other hand, as good an actor as he is, might want to give up his day job. He manages one of the trickiest feats in cinema: conveying through the medium of film the dense emotional complexities that we find in great novels. The cumulative power of THE WAR ZONE is frightening.
The opening scenes set the table for the revelation and anguish which will follow. Roth's direction at first seems rather mannered: the camera is static and holds for a long time on quiet, restrained scenes. Nothing much happens. It soon becomes apparent that this is not a stylistic tic, however, but mere reportage. This is a household where nothing much does happen: the silences are not exaggerated, they are a symptom. The source of the ambiguous malaise that besets the family is soon revealed: the daughter, Jessie, is being sexually abused by her father. No one knows until the son, Tom, comes home one night and sees his father and his sister in the bath together through a window. The family dynamics are already strained by the arrival of a newborn baby--a daughter--and Tom's discovery places a burden on him whose impact drives the film.
Incest and abuse are terrible subjects for fiction. Good art thrives on shades of grey, but sexual abuse is black and white: there is a victim, and a perpetrator. Right, and wrong. To tell us what is right and what is wrong is redundant. To offer therapeutic clichés is at best earnest and at worst trivializing. To steer between the Scylla of overwrought sincerity and the Charybdis of glib simplification is difficult. It is a testament to the sensitivity of THE WAR ZONE that it never once strikes the wrong note. It approaches its subject unflinchingly, including one graphic and appalling scene, but it is not exploitative. It leaves no doubt about the sins being committed by the father, but it does not preach needlessly.
Instead, the focus is on what abuse means to those who suffer it. It is about the psychological fall-out of the trauma. Both Ray Winstone (NIL BY MOUTH) as the father and Tilda Swinton as the mother are excellent, but they are good actors; what is exceptional about THE WAR ZONE are the performances by the two teenagers, who are reportedly non-actors, and whose ability to give nuanced expression to such complex pain is astonishing.
Freddie Cunliffe, as Tom, plays a boy who is taciturn and undemonstrative, yet we are able to perceive the tumult of conflicting emotions that surges within him, as he wrestles with his moral crisis. His emotions register only in the smallest gestures of his body language, in subtle modulations of his expression, but there is no mistaking them. Lara Belmont, as Jessie, plays the most damaged and the most complex character, and is even better. She shows us both the glib facade that Jessie presents to the world and the wretched humiliation she nurses within her, and these divergent selves always seem like aspects of the same young woman. There is a delicately understated scene involving the brother and sister and a cigarette lighter and such contradictory and inchoate emotions that few actors could manage it. It is a scene which could go wrong in so many ways, yet Cunliffe and Belmont play it perfectly, generating fierce drama.
THE WAR ZONE offers no answers. There are none which would not be facile. It simply bears witness, refusing to impose false resolutions. Tom and Jessie are victims, but they are also imperfect. Tom at first thinks his sister is a willing participant, and blames her as well as their father for what is happening. He unthinkingly makes cutting remarks which aggravate her sense of self-loathing. These scenes are painful, as we understand the damage being done while Tom does not, but they are honest, as is the entire movie.
The title at first seems odd, for there is no war, no zone. By the end, once we understand what the movie is about, it could not seem more appropriate. The war zone is the place where these people live, and although there are no guns, tanks, or trenches, there is savage and unbearable violence of the soul and, for Jess, of the body. And, as in all wars, there are survivors who bear wounds so deep they may never heal, wounds for which there is no justification.
Subjective Camera (subjective.freeservers.com) Movie Reviews by David Dalgleish (daviddalgleish@yahoo.com)
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