ORPHANS (The Shooting Gallery) Starring: Douglas Henshall, Gary Lewis, Stephen McCole, Rosemarie Stevenson, Frank Gallagher. Screenplay: Peter Mullan. Producers: Paddy Higson and Frances Higson. Director: Peter Mullan. MPAA Rating: R (profanity, violence, adult themes, sexual situations) Running Time: 97 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
You can't quite prepare for the possibility that your enjoyment of a film will hinge on subtitles. Those translating captions are truly a mixed blessing for the worldly cineaste. On the one hand, they're infinitely preferable to wretched dubbing that sucks the life out of performances. On the other hand, they can be undercut by techical ineptitude (fuzzy white text that gets lost in white backgrounds) or linguistic laziness (opting to translate only about every fourth word). Then there are the oddest cases, where English is translated back into English due to concern over the intelligibility of thick accents: TRAINSPOTTING, MY NAME IS JOE and the 1997 Scottish comedy-drama ORPHANS, just now making its way to American screens.
There's some pretty interesting stuff going on in ORPHANS. I only wish the subtitling hadn't distracted me virtually every minute of the film. The bulk of the story takes place in the 24 hours before the funeral of a Glasgow mother of four. Over the course of one long night and morning, the four siblings deal with radically different responses to their mother's death. Eldest son Thomas (Gary Lewis) keeps a vigilant, self-sacrificing watch over the casket at the church after an emotional performance at a karaoke bar. Michael (Douglas Henshall) copes with a knife wound sustained in a fight with a man who mocked Thomas' teary song. John (Stephen McCole) sets out with his pal Tanga (Frank Gallagher) to kill the man who injured Michael. And Sheila (Rosemarie Stevenson) -- wheelchair-bound with an unspecified condition, perhaps cerebral palsy -- simply wants to avoid the funeral altogether.
The siblings' adventures are entirely episodic, and therefore -- not surprisingly -- of widely varying quality. Most compelling are the misadventures of John and Tanga, including their stop to torment a customer who stiffed Chinese food deliveryman Tanga on a tip and a startling moment after John finally confronts the man he's sworn to kill. Michael's quiet encounter with his ex-wife is also a winner, leaving so many things unsaid that it says virtually everything. Less effective are Sheila's troubles after her chair's power runs out, and Thomas' over-the-top interpretation of his responsibility as number one son. The tone varies radically as well -- I don't know what twisted flight of writer/director Peter Mullan's fancy inspired Michael's run-in with an ill-tempered pub owner -- but on balance the stronger segments and the solid performances make ORPHANS well worth watching.
Unless, of course, the subtitles make you want to apply the palm of your hand to your forehead in a disco beat. It's not just that the accents, though thick, seem fairly understandable without any visual aids. It's not just that the subtitler seeks to prove that point by arbitrarily opting to let several lines of dialogue stand on their own. No, it's really the cringe-inducing job the subtitler does of not merely transcribing, but translating (eliminating contextually obvious colloquial expressions in favor of their blander synonyms). And not just translating, but editing (the subtitler steadfastly refuses to place a certain magic four-letter word on screen, and often substitutes "damn" for "f***ing"). The result is an art house film experience that's intellectually insulting: a movie delivered to a theatrical audience as though it were the airline version.
You can't blame Mullan for such a godawful decision; in fact, I feel sorry for him. He's made a film which, while flawed, has some provocative things to say about grief and family, wrapped up in turns of plot and character that are downright Shakespearean. That should have been the film American audiences were allowed to see, not this bizarre approximation in which the subtitles are wrapped around the film like a strip of paper on a hotel room toilet, sanitizing it for your protection. If this is what subtitle purists are going to get for their buck, maybe it's time to reconsider hiring Americans to do a dub job. I can listen to a botched, scene-ruining translation just as easily as someone I can read it.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 captions outrageous: 5.
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