Nil by Mouth . Newcity Chicago . 03-09-98

Nil by Mouth

DIRECTED BY: Gary Oldman

REVIEWED: 03-09-98

There is a remarkable book by the young English photographer, Richard Billingham, called "Ray's a Laugh." Billingham takes seemingly unstudied portraits of the squalid home life of his mother and his chronic alcoholic father. The disorder and familial violence both appall and fascinate--binges in progress; one morning, a baleful bruise beneath Mrs. Billingham's tired eyes. Billingham only watches, a family member crouching, not judging, keeping needful distance. Gary Oldman's "Nil by Mouth," a fierce, stylish, even grandiosely dismal paean to sobriety, dedicated to the memory of his father, is as harrowing an account of the effects of alcoholic degeneration as Billingham's startling work. The feeling of no-feeling is all that the battering Raymond (Ray Winstone) seeks. He is a charmer, he is a coward. His abuse of the pregnant mother (Kathy Burke, astonishing) of his daughter escalates from the verbal to the worst kind of battering. Set in an indistinct South London working-class neighborhood, Oldman says, "This film tells the blues of my memory." There are hints of Ken Loach (unflinching directness) and the great Terence Davies (patriarchal terror, public celebrations), but Oldman fuses them into something fresh. The semidocumentary look of "Nil by Mouth" has a questing acuity, the handheld shots as nimble as Hi-8 video. There are zooms within long-lens shots, shimmery motions that flick at the heart, little visual revelations posing as accidents. Colors are sometimes so bright, so saturated, they parch the eye: toxic blues, hot neon oranges, washed by viscous sheets of chill rain. Behaviorally, Oldman's writing is a marvel of diligent observation. There is a keen and moral mind behind the script, the incessant profanity, high-octane dissipation, torrents of verbal abuse, the downward spiral of unwitting self-annihilation, all mask a searing sorrow. Oldman's story is not of the working class, although it is set plausibly in that environment. More importantly, he captures the paranoia, the slow yet inevitable degeneration of the addict, studiously charting the industriousness of the addict's necessary steps, the ritual required, desired, to spasm into that short-lived bliss. Nor are jealousy and possessiveness restricted to any one class, any one family. The poet Philip Larkin's "This Be the Verse" famously suggests the universal pain: "They fuck you up, your mum and dad./They may not mean to, but they do./They fill you with the faults they had/And add some extra, just for you." Watch the small daughter's eyes. They are large, grow larger, as she observes one intimate cataclysm after another. The unaccountable violations pass before her. Perhaps wisdom will come, the next generation. Oldman's film breathes hope.

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