To judge by the opening credits and marketing, Filth is supposed to be a dark comedy about Bruce Robertson (James McAvoy), a “bad lieutenant” (he’s actually a detective, but I figured I’d get the comparison out of the way early) in a Scottish constabulary who’s manipulating his peers as he jockeys for a promotion to Detective Inspector. To go along with that he’s a drug addict and sexual deviant with violent tendencies. Going in, I know I’m supposed to see this as darkly comic, the fact I didn’t find it funny at all pretty much sums up my experience.
Writer/director Jon S. Baird, adapting the Irvine Welsh novel, may have something comical for the first 5-10 minutes, but once the actual plot gets underway this is a dark psychological drama that gets bogged down in tonal issues, resulting in tedium.
Given the fact it’s adapted from a Welsh novel, comparisons to Danny Boyle‘s Trainspotting are inevitable and I’d say this film certainly wants to be Trainspotting, but Baird is a long way from the tonal control of Danny Boyle. There’s certainly something interesting about the story and I can imagine myself falling head over heels for it if Baird exhibited any control of the material, but he seems to think the frantic pace and debauchery is enough to win over an audience, when in fact you have to do more than just show us people acting crazy, you have to have some reasoning behind it.
The reasoning here seems to suggest we’re supposed to sit back and laugh at Bruce’s antics until consequences start to arise. Problem is, I was never laughing… Okay, maybe I laughed a little at the “small dick” joke related to Jamie Bell‘s character, but that’s about it.
A recent film I felt more adequately walked the line between dramatic and comically absurd was Dom Hemingway, but largely because the character in that film had some level of recognition what he was doing wasn’t altogether good. In that sense they are two different films, there’s a psychological aspect to Filth, which doesn’t lend itself easily to comedy, yet both films take a similar approach to the material.
There is a narrative struggle as well. The death of a local man kicks off the story and would seem to be the through-line for the rest of the film, allowing for Bruce’s bad behavior to play a role alongside the investigation. I guess, in technical terms, it does just that, but from each moment to the next I could hardly make heads or tails of what was going on or why so many of these scenes actually mattered.
Overly-stylized scenes featuring Bruce’s wife more than hint at what is eating away at him on the inside and the constant fantasy flashes of his psychiatrist (Jim Broadbent) as well as the hallucinatory visions he deals with on occasion, all accompanied by ear-shattering screeches, all feel like they’re from other films rather than whatever this is trying to be.
McAvoy does what he can with the character, frequently seen stressing out over his hallucinations or aggressively masturbating every other scene. Eddie Marsan‘s Bladesey is probably the most interesting character, but his most intriguing scene is a sidebar sequence where he and Bruce go to Hamburg for a bit of debauchery of their own, which results in Bladesey high on ecstasy and dancing to techno at a gay bar. Only mildly humorous, the scene is just another interlude in a film filled with them. Yes, the story moves along, but there aren’t many films as busy as this one that still manage to be this boring.
In the end, I have no problem with a dark comedy or even a darkly psychological one, but I found very little to laugh at in this film, which makes virtually every scene fall flat considering they were supposedly played for laughs but come across flatly dramatic. Instead it’s almost a confluence of heightened fantasy and dark reality, and the two just don’t fit, especially once it becomes clear things have shifted from comic to dramatic.
