What Richard Did

The title of this Irish film, What Richard did, contains the excitement right from before you start watching. A neat trick, if you like to create interest, and this does the trick. The script is based on a novel "Bad day in Block Rock" by Kevin Power, which again was inspired by real events.

The film invited us into some youngsters every day Irish life, just outside Dublin. 18 year old Richard Karlsen, obviously the main character, is a sympathetic sports (rugby) guy, and what you would reckon a young alpha male. Irish mother, Danish father, living a normal life. Attractive, serious, sportive and a leader of the pack of youngsters. Not a smoker, but still does, occasionally. Well we're introduced to his holiday life during summer. Happy non important days around a guy with has everything going for him. Even gets a girlfriend, which seems like a perfect match to him.

Great acting all over. Jack Reynor is amazing, and so is his father, Danish Lars Mikkelsen, as always. They're important, but the whole cast is brilliant, which tells us what a great instructor the director Lenny Abrahamson obviously is. Very true, very realistically told, and as far away from what would have been told in a Hollywood film as possible. A very accurate portrait. The film does a terrific job in introducing us to the persons gallery. Beautifully told, and obviously very important if you want to make a film like this with a real punch.

I love realistically told movies like this. We really get inside Richard's feelings, the agonizing pain he suffers from afterwards. The despair. Slowly told, using a lot of silence, this might not be suitable for the one's seeking action. This is a drama which outright tells what a situation like this is, not putting in extra dramatically points to color up the story. I lived the way the camera is used to express thoughts and feeling, showing how it is to be living with guilt.

The film has a very important message. It's very easy to do acts under the influence of alcohol. It may ruin lives in just a bad decision. Things like thick force not only have one victim, is has several, and it'll also easily ruin both the innocence, the friendship and at least a part of the future, making marks which never fully mend. There's many living with this pain around, a pain which will always be there.

'What Richard Did' is a distinctly underwhelming title for this film, but it is at least descriptive. Richard is a good looking middle class lad, seemingly someone with few problems other than a bit of entirely normal teenage sexual jealousy; then something bad happens, and he has to deal with it. I thought the portrait of his everyday life was pretty convincing and well done; but the film's refuasl to descend into melodrama thereafter is a weakness as much as a strength: following the shock, nothing much happens. The result feels like half a story: well-enough told, but without sufficient underlying narrative purpose.

'What Richard Did' is a bit of a slow burn, but it's complex and often emotional, consistently anchored by an amazingly ambiguous and complicated performance from Jack Reynor.

I definitely sought this out because I was a big fan of the director's recent film Room. His directorial hand is sort of similar here, in terms of giving a lot of weight and true significant to the little details in character interactions, and in terms of each half of the film being primarily centered around a different development (although the first half of this is basically set-up and character development so the second half hits harder, and boy does it do a great job of that). I thought all of the performances here were very refined and pretty realistic. The actors do a great job of really inhabiting their characters and making the most out of small moments with he director's help. Overall, very effective film, moves along nicely and a very powerful morality act. That ending is genius.

This film seems to confirm and amplify Abrahamson's (Adam & Paul, Garage) considerable strengths as a film-maker, and, to a lesser extent his frustrating weaknesses.

On the plus side, he is great with his actors, both in who he casts and what he gets out of them. His characters always feel complex and real. He also sets up very convincing, morally ambiguous worlds, situations and people. No easy heroes and villains.

But he also has a tendency to be drawn to melodramatic twists, and those actually make his films less interesting, not more, as it feels like he's trying to force the emotional issues.

In many ways my favorite part of the film was the first 45 minutes before the central incident. Abrahamson is great at observing and capturing the complexities of late teen-age life with subtlety and a fresh eye. These aren't the desperate angry street kids of poverty, nor are they the morally bankrupt idiots we often see rich kids portrayed as. They feel real; they drink, but they're not all alcoholics and stoners. They have sex, but more often than not it's attached to some sense of emotion, at graspings towards being in a relationship. Their parents are flawed but trying. Its people as people, not just symbols, even though subtle issues of class and social standing inform the whole story.

But when it gets to the big twists and the big themes, I felt it laboring more, working at it's effects instead of letting them happen. It's not that the 2nd half isn't good,it's that it lacks the power the set up and situation seems to promise. It sticks to it's ambiguity, but it starts to feel just a touch like an intellectual conceit, not an exploration of darker human truths.