..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

Young Adam

Directed by David Mackenzie

The beauty of sadness: a rare thing in movies nowadays.

In Young Adam, David Mackenzie’s lush, pained adaptation of Scottish Beat author Alexander Trocchi’s 1953 novel, Ewan Macgregor plays Joe, a Glasgow writer who’s chucked his typewriter into the drink, abandoned his devoted girlfriend (Emily Mortimer) and given himself over to a rough life. There’s cruelty in his eyes. He keeps yap shut, taking physical work on a coal barge in the city’s River Clyde. It’s run by Les (blustery, stolid Peter Mullan), whose wife Ella (the great Tilda Swinton, squintily simmering) is soon his newest creation.

The movie got an NC-17 for its intensity, if not its sexual explicitness, and it’s one of the most daring, richest, most astute, most compelling portraits of psychological abuse and emotionally sadomasochistic bonds in relationships in ages. It’s oddly timeless, with Trocchi’s tragic 1950s existentialist despair seeming utterly contemporary about the human need to connect.

All the characters in touch, but they’re still lonely despite human contact. “Sex coming out of that,” Mackenzie concurs, “You know why they’re doing it. They’re reaching out for a tiny bit of warmth that’s available.”

They’re not modern-day fantasists. People can hide inside their loneliness today. Media, pornography, any number of pursuits that aren’t about skin-to-skin. It seems quaint, almost, that these characters who are lonely, are making contact. Even Les has got his mates at the pub. What’s the difference between then and now, how people deal with their loneliness, I wonder? “C. S. Lewis said we read to know we’re not alone,” the fiercely articulate Swinton says. “Which is interesting, in relation to Joe, the artist, the writer, throwing his typewriter into the canal and kind of giving up, giving up the idea of reaching out. He goes for loneliness, in a way, doesn’t he?”

There are people who choose to be isolated, I agree, to secret themselves from the world. Whether you grew up an only child, or there was a tragedy, and for years someone mourns for too long. It’s fascinating that Ella, when she starts defining and confining things once Les is out of picture. Suddenly it’s “we” will do this; “we” will do that. There’s a definition. Joe doesn’t react, really, other than shutting himself off from the passion they’d shared as an illicit couple. “What we’ve often talked about is the threesome, as it were, they’re engaged in, from early on, that’s the deal they’re into,” Mackenzie says. “And then when Les leaves, the landscape changes and it becomes something different. Because Ella needs at least one man to run that barge, to work that barge —“ He laughs. “She needs to grab on and make sure that now Les is gone, that Joe stays. She goes about it the wrong way, making her plans. We always talked about the idea that they’re walking a tightrope, having the adulterous affair. Then when that’s over and they’re just having a relationship, she starts putting
her feet on the ground and reaching out —“

Swinton interjects, “Even further than that, my contention is always that you only really ever get found out if you want to be, whether consciously or unconsciously. She arranges it, Les finding it. And at
that point, as David says, it’s blown. Because the triangle doesn’t work anymore.”

“But it’s interesting, the search for definition,” Mackenzie continues. “I’ve often done that, we seek to define ourselves. We’re always trying to define and redefine. That’s when we start getting in trouble. When we’re floating in an undefined space, you’re closer to being, in some way, a receptacle for some kind of truth. It seems that when you start boxing yourself in, trouble starts occurring.”

It seems a constant, there’s something clandestine, when it no longer has to be hidden, you become less attractive, you’re not bringing the taboo, you’re just the regular person, the candidate to be a mate. “A very different game, isn’t it?” Mackenzie says, cards close to his chest.

“I think it has as much to do, though, with the idea of articulacy and inarticulacy,” Swinton says. “So we can see that what Joe is looking for, however unconsciously it may be, is some kind of inarticulacy. He throws his intellect into the canal, he throws fiction along with it and he goes looking for something authentic. And he kind of buries himself in the physical world, in labor and life and in this physical relationship with this extraordinarily inarticulate woman with whom he doesn’t speak at all. The more they talk to one another, the more she talks to him, the more the gilt comes off the gingerbread. Because inarticulacy is actually what he’s in it for. She’s in it for a different reason. She’s not looking for the same thing. But I love that idea, just reframing what you were saying, the second things become articulated, not just defined, but actually articulated, literally, and told, they can actually disappear.”

Say something aloud, put a name to it, the magic is gone. “Yeah,” she says. “It always amused me in the story when after they’ve had the first encounter by the canal-side that Joe starts talking about [Les] discovering that body. And Joe has probably said a grand total of, say, six sentences to her in the course of the film. She says, “You’ve done enough talking for one night!”” They both laugh.

“Yeah, yeah,” Swinton says. “Sex is another way of having a conversation.”