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| Robbie knows he's got the change his life around. |
I sometimes have a wee nightmare, I go to see the latest
movie directed by Ken Loach and leave the cinema not likening it and then I wake
up in a cold sweat!!! Well thankfully it’s never actually happened and his
latest collaboration with screenwriter Paul Laverty The Angels’ Share (2012) did
not let me down. In fact it’s like a cool breathe of fresh movie air and if
someone tells you they did not like it they must be dead from the heart
upwards. This Scottish comedy drama, filmed in Glasgow and Edinburgh, is a
glorious mix of Sweet Sixteen (2002) My Name is Joe (1998) A Fond Kiss (2004) and Looking for Eric (2009) hilariously
topped off with humour that can only come from the Glaswegian working class, a
complete change from the dream team’s last offering, the drama/thriller Route
Irish (2010) which explored the corporate greed and
corruption involved with the private military company’s (PMC’s) working in
Iraq.
Ken Loach was quoted as saying that
because the number of unemployed young people in Britain has reached over a
million for the first time he wanted to tell a story about this generation, a
lot of whom will face a bleak future. A generation that can be pretty sure,
unless of course something really revolutionary happens, that they will never
get a permanent secure job. He wanted to show the effect of this on people and
how they see themselves. The delightful notion of the ‘Angels Share’ is the
distiller’s term for the percentage of the whisky that vaporises as it matures
in the cask never to be drunk and never destined to give the taxman his
revenue.
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| A community service day trip. |
When Robbie Emerson sneaks into the
maternity hospital and sees his newborn son Luke for the first time he knows
his life has got to change. He’s unemployed and carrying out community service
but his main problem is staying out of prison where he will be sent should he
get involved with any more violent assaults which is not as easy as it sounds
with his girlfriend Leone’s family not wanting him to have anything to do with her
or the baby and on top of that there’s an on going feud with Clancy and his
cohorts, the reason he got community service in the first place. On community
service Robbie meets Rhino, Albert and Mo who are under the guidance of Harry,
a whisky connoisseur who takes this butch of ne’er-do-wells to a whisky
distillery where Robbie finds he has a nose for the stuff, can this discovery
change his life?
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| Maybe this wee dram will help to change Robbie's life? |
As normal the movie does not star any
big bankable artists and I can assure you it’s none the worse for it.
The most experienced is TV actor John Henshaw who plays Harry, his second film
for Loach; in Looking for Eric he
played Meatballs. Newcomer Paul Brannigan plays Robbie, Gary Maitland who had
small parts in Sweet Sixteen and Tickets (2005) plays Albert, Jasmin
Riggins is Mo her biggest part to date and William Ruane who can be seen in
three other of the directors films Sweet
Sixteen, Tickets and The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006)
plays Rhino.
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| Albert and Mo should not mess with the Irn-Bru! |
Ken Loach and the feel good factor sounds somewhat of a
contradiction but these of us who are familiar with the great mans work may
disagree. Admittedly his body of work deals with serious subjects and themes but
in all his production’s there’s always an element of humour but The Angels’ Share is probable his second
all out comedy after Looking for Eric
which teamed former professional footballer Eric Cantona and Steve Evets to
great effect. My only complaint is the use of the dreadful Reid brothers, not
once but twice, on the soundtrack still it just proves that Ken’s human.
As a matter of interest the films distributor Entertainment
One marketed the film differently in Scotland than it did south of the border.
Here it was deemed to be a mainstream comedy and advertised as such holding its
own against the normal multiplex offerings as well as showing at art-house
theatres, where in England it mainly appealed to art-house audiences. Originally
the BBFC awarded it an 18 certificate because of the excessive use of the ‘c’
word normally limited to five in a 15 certificate (seven in this film). The
distributors got around this by arguing that in Glasgow, and the way it was
used in the film, doesn’t carry the same level of offence and could even be an
endearment, eventually gaining it’s 15 certificate which in turn widened its
audience base[1].
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