Sid e Nancy

I missed SID & NANCY when it was first released. I wasn't expecting much when settling down to watch the DVD. I was pleasantly surprised to find a coherent, energetic but ultimately melancholy study of co-dependency, with two terrific central performances.

We get to know Chloe Webb's child-woman Nancy to a greater extent than we do Gary Oldman's wild-man Sid. Not the actors' fault. In fact it's not a fault at all. There is something inexplicable there. Whatever forces were at play in forming the young man who became Sid Vicious, it's to the credit of Alex Cox and his team that they don't waste time speculating upon them or trying to analyse them. Instead, the film lives up to its title, starting just before the relationship starts and ending just after Nancy's death.

The era in which the film was made is a significant factor in appreciating it. It was, in the UK at any rate, a time when the welfare state that had been so painstakingly put into place began to be systematically unravelled, a land where the notion of Society was belittled, in which hyper-individualism was lauded, where any sense of community was being abandoned, and the search for it becoming a joke. WALL ST, the'hero' of which was to famously declare Greed to be good, was released the year after SID AND NANCY. I remember all that only too well. And of course it's not over yet: the unravelling continues.

Sid and Nancy meet in a frenzy and finish in a fog. In between they shore each other up as best they can, two bits of flotsam on an indifferent sea. We're shown only a little of where Sid came from, mercifully not enough to help us theorise about how he came to be the embodiment of anarchy. Instead, through Oldman's bravura, we see his unmitigated charisma, at which the film's unctuous Malcolm McClaren (played by David Hayman) smiles knowingly and which he merrily exploits. We do see Nancy in the context of her family, but again, instead of attempting to use this encounter to explaining her, Cox gives us a sense of how pleased the family was to get rid of her. If Romeo and Juliet had been like Sid and Nancy, the Montagues and the Capulets would have paid to get them married and out of Verona altogether.

Sid and Nancy is a movie about the tortured relationship between Sid Vicious and his whiny girlfriend, Nancy. Please, somebody turn down the volume on this one, simply because her voice is just too irritating on this critic's last nerve! (Did she really talk like that, or was Ms. Webb in serious need of a voice coach? We may never know.) Most of Sid and Nancy revolves around the two titled post-teen's attempt to maintain some semblance of a real relationship in the midst of a lot of drugs and self-induced violence. What stopped me from turning off this sad statement of a generation was the performance of Gary Oldman. His sneering imitation of Sid's contempt for almost everyone around him masked a touching vulnerability when it came to Nancy and – yep, even their pet kitty.

And I've got to give the truly unforgettable award to Sid and Nancy, based on one single cinematic moment in the film--- you know what that moment is, don't you? Yeppers - Sid belting out a searing rendition of Old Blue Eye's favorite, "My Way". Set against a backdrop of stairs (that call to mind every high school assembly), Oldman scratches and claws at this song with such a ferocious intensity I'd give him the gold statue right now.

Because that's what a cinematic moment really is, the sum total of the character, presented to the audience in a kernel of truth. Gary Oldman – an actor whose gold statuette is long overdue — captures the twin torments of a twisted teen that really just wants to be loved and doesn't know how to get past his own angry angst.

When I was 15, I loved this movie because I loved the Sex Pistols and everything punk. Now that I am twice that age, I love this film for its unflinching portrayal of two people's lives, despite how uncomfortable it makes us, how little we sympathize with them as people, or how hard it is for us to comprehend the choices they made. I personally believe at least part of the discomfort comes from the fact that at some level, we DO understand Sid and Nancy, their love for each other, and the choices they make beneath the haze of addiction.

I realize, seeing it with adult eyes, why my parents were so shocked I was watching this film in 1987. But ironically, it was the best anti-drug message I could have seen in my teenage years. In performances so masterful they make me wince, fight off nausea, and weep for their misfortune, Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb constructed characters no one would ever want to be. The supporting cast deserves accolades as well - in particular, Andrew Schofield turns in a seamless portrayal of Johnny Rotten, who, unlike Sid, knows full well Malcolm MacLaren created him.

Having read "And I Don't Want To Live This Life" by Debora Spungen, and having seen more than a handful of documentaries with live footage of the band throughout the years, what impressed me most was the consistency of tone that Oldman and Webb bring to their performances. They are spot-on, not just in stupor and excess, but in tenderness and rare moments of clarity. The movie's ending was unique among biopics where the truth is in dispute, in that it did not profess to know the answer to that burning question (did Sid kill Nancy?) any more than Sid knew himself.

Why watch a film about a couple of junkies who came from unremarkable backgrounds and disappeared into the bleakness of drug addiction? We seem to want our films to be about something loftier than ourselves. I view "Sid and Nancy" more as a play than a movie - we allow our plays to be about uncomfortable subjects and unhappy people, but seem to think that celluloid must be as bright as the projector light behind it. This film is a study in love and dysfunction; its characters are painfully imperfect but perfectly portrayed and we cannot help but respond, even if our response is the deep, squirming discomfort that leads us to say we disliked the whole experience.

I rated this film a very rare 9.

You really need to ask yourself if you love the Pistols and the general era of the late 70's. If you do, the film will fall flat for you.

The details are all wrong, the key incidents of the band and Sid's involvement with them are way off. The personalities of key people are wrong, some characters just made up, rather sloppily too.

So we can forgive it for being a wholly inaccurate of Sid Vicious' life. Fine, but so then what we are left with is a basic love story. It fails at this too, mostly because Nancy is written out pure spite and misogyny. She is therefore not only unlikable but wholly uninteresting.

You never believe the love story, because quite frankly Nancy isn't really written as a human being, just a series of tropes about junkies and that awful idea that women are shrews that stifle men's creativity.

The truth is Nancy was much more physically beautiful than this film wishes to admit. She was also quite charming, in fact, if you know junkie culture, you know that charm, deadly psychotic charm is a key way to survive and support your habit. None of that is shown here, so that ability for junkies to convince others they are clean, or kind or honest is obliterated.

Nancy was smarter than this film gives credit for (yes even though she was a junkie), with more charisma too and if they had written her that way it would make for a better film.

The real Sid fell in love with a real human being, a flawed one to be sure, but the kind of junkie a lot of us could fall for. In this film she's just a very nasty series of dull, obvious tropes.

Just about everyone intimately involved with the Sex Pistols has disowned this film.

I think there are moments of visual poetry in this film, I think Gary Oldman's performance is excellent, but the script is a Hollywood hackneyed attempt to reduce the Sex Pistols to every stereotype and narrow prejudice those who were never punks have always harbored about the punk movement.

It's sad because there is some real craft to this film, it had tremendous potential, but ultimately you can just never believe Sid would fall for this less-than-human harpy. Sad because there's a real reason Nancy swept Sid off his feet.

The truth, in this case, is not only stranger than fiction, it was also far more compelling.

Some films tend to glorify rock and roll by showing off its glamorous side full of adventure and wonder. Sid and Nancy does no such thing. Instead it exposes the dirty, grimy, seedy underbelly of punk rock which is full of violence and drugs. Gary Oldman plays Sid Vicious, the bassist for British punk rock group the Sex Pistols. The film chronicles his life from when he meets his junky girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, to the tragic demise of that relationship. It is a loud, mean, ugly, and crass film that perfectly captures all that the Sex Pistols stood for... anarchy. Filled with all sorts of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, Sid and Nancy is a seriously wild ride.

If there's anything that makes this film, it's Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb. These two are incredible, Oldman more so. Oldman captures the self destructive tendencies of Sid excellently and takes it to a frighteningly believable extreme. It is a terrifying and shocking experience to watch him run amuck in this film, spray painting walls, nonstop drinking, shooting heroin every chance he gets, burning houses, etc. He is the true essence of anarchy, and yet somehow we feel sympathy for him. This is solely because of Nancy, the girlfriend. She is a character you love to hate. She is a pathetic excuse for a human being, always whining to get her way and her drugs, never contributing anything positive to Sid's life, and always screaming about her own problems. It is sickening and it makes the film all the more twisted and engrossing as we watch such self destruction unfold on screen.

It's not easy to tell a story where your two main characters are so easily hateable, but somehow this film does it. I think it is because of the balance between Nancy and Sid that we feel compelled to pity Sid and despise Nancy, making the film engaging in an offbeat and slightly deranged way. Their story is so backwards and so wretchedly obscene that we have to be interested in it somehow. It starts off simply enough. The Sex Pistols are all about anarchy and they go around beating people up, cursing, drinking, and all that sort of thing. But it isn't until Sid meets Nancy that things really start to explode as the story falls deeper and deeper into a twisted fit of depravity. Thing get worse and worse for the two as the film progresses and Sid's life slowly crumbles around him, with him too drunk or too high to even notice. The film does lag a little bit towards the middle as the conversations between Nancy and Sid begin to get a little repetitive, but we are then hit by an expected yet still powerful ending that closes out the film at just the right tone and atmosphere.

There is really nothing sane or reasonable about Sid and Nancy. It envelopes true chaos and discourse through the life of one man and his ridiculous girlfriend. It is a chore to watch this film as it does chronicle a life full of the most horrible habits and attitudes imaginable, but if you can stomach it all then Sid and Nancy is a fantastic film to experience. I loved this film and was truly fascinated by it. It displays a lifestyle a would never want to live. Instead, I only want to learn about it in vulgar detail from a great film like Sid and Nancy.