Coming to the States with plenty of Blighty cred is Fish Tank, a feature length film from the Oscar-winning short-film director Andrea Arnold. Unfortunately I can’t echo the love this film has received across the pond as it is nothing more than a cliche-driven story of 15-year-old named Mia (Katie Jarvis) whose home life involves constant dismissal from her mother and an exchange of insults with her younger sister. These are facts that extend into her social life as she goes around hating the world. A hate that shows in damn near every scene, at least when she isn’t trying to free an overly metaphorical chained-up white horse, but even then I felt her primary reason for doing it is simply to piss off the owners.
Things change, slightly, when Mia takes advantage of a strange connection she has with her mother’s boyfriend Connor, played by Michael Fassbender (Inglourious Basterds, Hunger). However, just when you think/hope this film may offer something different it follows a path we have seen too many times before and not even its well-executed final moment can save it.
The fact Fish Tank is described as a “coming-of-age story” is drastically misleading as there is no coming-of-age as much as there is escape, and very little of it at that. From start to finish you never feel as if Mia learns anything from her experiences and is only going to move on in her life making someone else miserable.
The only cliche Arnold avoids, and I’m not entirely sure it was intentional, was the fact she never glamorizes Mia’s love for hip-hop dancing. This is most likely due to the fact Mia isn’t much of a dancer, but her dancing isn’t meant to be flashy as much as it is the only escape offered her. Beyond these moments of solitude, Arnold makes sure to place Mia in the worst possible situations, surrounded by some of the worst possible people and needlessly escalates things into a hackneyed potboiler toward the end.
In terms of acting, a lot of reviews have hailed Jarvis as some sort of a stand out. She’s not bad, but I can’t say I saw anything here that would have me telling others they need to rush out to see her. On the other hand, Fassbender continues to impress me as I look at him and see an actor much like Christian Bale only more talented. Had Fassbender delivered one false move in this film it would have completely crumbled. He didn’t.
Things aren’t all misery and melancholy however, much of the photography and shots Arnold and cinematographer Robbie Ryan deliver are fantastic. They symbolically decided to go for a 4:3 aspect ratio providing a standard (claustrophobic) television look at things rather than widescreen, and it is the film’s one true stand-out.
Also, Arnold does handle Mia’s quieter moments with much more skill than she does the majority of her outbursts. Mia is a lit fuse waiting to go off in most every circumstance, but when offered the chance to reflect, or when put in a situation even she realizes is beyond her years, something is truly achieved, but that something is few and far between with Fish Tank.
