At one point in Rowan Joffe’s new adaptation of Graham Greene’s 1938 novel, the film’s savage little anti-hero Pinkie (Sam Riley) sits down for a heart-to-heart with his sweet bride to be, Rose (Andrea Riseborough). The time is 1964. The scene is set in Brighton, Britain’s famous seaside playground, notorious for its seedy underworld of chancers and spivs. While the sea pounds, Pinkie declares, 'I’m bad. You’re good. We’re made for each other." Rose, her eyes swimming, is hooked. As proposals go, Pinkie’s declaration is about as promising as the worst kind of confession.
Greene published Brighton Rock after he had converted to Catholicism. It’s what we now think of as a classic crime plot, built around murder, revenge and pursuit. It’s a story about relative morality, and the nature of good and evil that pits a set of characters schooled in right and wrong against others without faith. Green once said: 'In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths." It’s an ambitious and deeply felt book, full of suffering, guilt and fear about stark moral choices. In Brighton Rock, evil has nothing to do with nature or individual psychology.
The reason why Pinkie wants to marry young Rose, a waitress, isn’t because he loves her – indeed he seems to loathe her needy, clinging desire. It’s because, as his wife, she cannot testify against him in any murder trial. Pinkie, a cohort of a gang attempting to control the rackets on the seaside, has murdered Hale (Sean Harris) and he needs Rose as an alibi. Ida (Helen Mirren), an ex-lover of Hale, sets out to nail Pinkie for the murder and save Rose. But perhaps Rose doesn’t want to be redeemed?
The action of the film is set during the war between two tribes of youth gangs: Mods and Rockers. For the uninitiated, Rockers rode motorbikes, dressed in leather, and listened to '50s rock 'n’ roll. Mods wore Italian-styled suits and shirts, listened to soul and R’n’B, cut their hair short and rode Vespas and Lambrettas. The real-life Mods and Rockers went head-to-head in the seaside resorts of England in the early '60s, and Joffe works hard to integrate this background history into the foreground plot. For instance, Pinkie, whose sartorial taste runs to imitating screen gangsters, decides to disguise himself as a Mod. While trying to make a getaway, Pinkie steals a scooter but finds himself leading a gang of Mods right just as they converge on Brighton. In one of the movie’s climatic bits of action, Joffe uses a riot between the Mods and Rockers as a way to 'cover’ some sinister violence.
The Mod setting offers all sorts of tantalising possibilities; with all the wild, heedless violence around him, is the guilt-ridden Catholic Pinkie already in Hell? Are the Mods a symbol of intergenerational hatred of all that’s old fashioned and outmoded?
I’m not at all sure that Joffe makes the best use of a clever idea in updating Greene’s '30s yarn. At best, it seems superficial, a backdrop for some in-jokes for pop culture fans, and, at worst, a lacquer of pure style, a sop to the current vogue for '60s modernism. There are no Mod characters, and the film’s drama, its language, attitude and spirit projects an ersatz coloured version of '40s noir.
Joffe has adapted an ambitious work but his film doesn’t capture the depth and longing in Greene’s story. He keeps the plot business whirling and piles on the pyrotechnics, yet it doesn’t help the film’s feel. It’s draggy, lumpy and leaden. Brighton Rock has the baroque, heated, pushy visual style of a mega-budget music video. Cinematographer John Mathieson has the camera swoop, dive and glide over the action. The moves are pretty, but they don’t evoke much of anything. It’s a style best suited to flogging off expensive cars.
The actors achieve some good work, especially Riseborough whose Rose is a confusion of warring impulses and teenage desire. John Hurt turns up as a pal of Mirren’s Ida. He’s good for a couple of hard looks and dry jokes. Riley plays the entire film with a whopping great scar across one side of his face and is lumbered with a part that under Joffe’s direction appears as both underwritten and over the top. The ending here is the same as the Boulting Brothers’ 1947 version; romantic and void of the quarrelsome morality essential to Greene’s book.
