Fish Tank is a puzzle for me.
It's undoubtedly well made. The acting is truly excellent. It appears to be loaded with a lot of subtext and symbolism...it's not something that was knocked off in a hurry.
Yet for all the care and passion that undoubtedly went into its production, I just couldn't connect with it, which I found odd. Yes, I'm American but I always have found Mike Liegh's films to be very compelling, so I'll try to describe what I found it lacking by way of comparison.
Take Leigh's "Naked" and compare it to this film. Most of the characters in that film are extremely unlikable. It's by all accounts a brutal, grim, and depressing film (Fish Tank is probably the lighter of the two). Yet, I found the characters in "Naked" to be very compelling because I felt Leigh exposed them gradually. You couldn't predict their every move and motivation. I found almost all the characters in Fish Tank to be quite simplistic in comparison. Mia wants to be free. She wants to dance. She hates her home life. She's in love with her mom's boyfriend who has a VERY predictable secret that he's hiding.
And that's my real problem with this movie: the script. It follows a somewhat similar arc to Leigh's film even though the characters are nothing close to being similar. But Leigh's characters are compelling, and their journey is compelling. There is nothing in Fish Tank's story or characters that we haven't seen in similar coming-of-age movies many times before. If you take issue with this comparison, try Karen Moncrieff's "Blue Car" --- it's almost idenmtical to "Fish Tank" but the characters are a bit less black-and-white and off-putting, and that helps lift the story into places "Fish Tank" never gets near.
Without dimensional characters and a good story, the tawdry ugliness of this picture seems to exist for no other purpose than to shock, the way Larry Clark's "Kids" did when it was released. The scene of the 9 year old smoking a cig with her friend in front of the tube made me think of Clark's film and the bathtub/joint scene. But by now, these kind of "shocks" are a bit passé.
The off the wall reception this film has received is what stymies me. It almost appears as if Andrea Arnold was following a recipe for a "cutting-edge raw slice of life." It's well made yes, but it's none of the above.
It's undoubtedly well made. The acting is truly excellent. It appears to be loaded with a lot of subtext and symbolism...it's not something that was knocked off in a hurry.
Yet for all the care and passion that undoubtedly went into its production, I just couldn't connect with it, which I found odd. Yes, I'm American but I always have found Mike Liegh's films to be very compelling, so I'll try to describe what I found it lacking by way of comparison.
Take Leigh's "Naked" and compare it to this film. Most of the characters in that film are extremely unlikable. It's by all accounts a brutal, grim, and depressing film (Fish Tank is probably the lighter of the two). Yet, I found the characters in "Naked" to be very compelling because I felt Leigh exposed them gradually. You couldn't predict their every move and motivation. I found almost all the characters in Fish Tank to be quite simplistic in comparison. Mia wants to be free. She wants to dance. She hates her home life. She's in love with her mom's boyfriend who has a VERY predictable secret that he's hiding.
And that's my real problem with this movie: the script. It follows a somewhat similar arc to Leigh's film even though the characters are nothing close to being similar. But Leigh's characters are compelling, and their journey is compelling. There is nothing in Fish Tank's story or characters that we haven't seen in similar coming-of-age movies many times before. If you take issue with this comparison, try Karen Moncrieff's "Blue Car" --- it's almost idenmtical to "Fish Tank" but the characters are a bit less black-and-white and off-putting, and that helps lift the story into places "Fish Tank" never gets near.
Without dimensional characters and a good story, the tawdry ugliness of this picture seems to exist for no other purpose than to shock, the way Larry Clark's "Kids" did when it was released. The scene of the 9 year old smoking a cig with her friend in front of the tube made me think of Clark's film and the bathtub/joint scene. But by now, these kind of "shocks" are a bit passé.
The off the wall reception this film has received is what stymies me. It almost appears as if Andrea Arnold was following a recipe for a "cutting-edge raw slice of life." It's well made yes, but it's none of the above.