After
the success of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl,
the unreliable narrator became all the rage in popular fiction, but Martin Amis
had already been there and done that. Admittedly, his untrustworthy
story-teller was a bloke rather than a “girl,” but the principal is the same.
In this case, he also happened to be a failed novelist—an Amisian trope if ever
there was one (see The Information).
Long mired in legal and financial wrangling, Amis’s celebrated deceptive
narrator finally gets a theatrical release, but he is not fooling anyone in
Matthew Cullen’s London Fields (trailer here), which opens
today in New York.
Thus
far, Samson Young’s literary career has been a miserable failure, but he picked
the perfect time to visit London. Apocalyptic riots break out nightly across
the city, but the lack of tourism meant the terminally ill writer could swing a
flat exchange with pompous bestselling novelist Mark Asprey, swapping his crummy
Hell’s Kitchen apartment for the tony London pad. As a further fringe benefit, Young
discovers Asprey also has quite a beautiful neighbor in Nicola Six, who might
just provide the inspiration for the page-turner he never had in him.
Young
quickly learns Six has foretold the exact time of her death, which is fast
approaching. However, she only knows she will be murdered—not by whom. For
impishly perverse reasons, Six seems determined to help fate along, by stoking
the lust and jealousy of the two leading suspects: flamboyant small-time
hoodlum Keith Talent and petulantly entitled gentry-lad Guy Clinch. Young is
convinced he can just record this real-life “novel” unfolding around him to
finally score his bestseller.
The
biggest problem with Roberta Hanley’s adapted screenplay is that we can
immediately guess the big twist as soon as the film establishes all the main
characters. Maybe it is all Gillian Flynn’s fault, but even if the troubled
film had been released before Fincher’s Gone
Girl, Cullen and Hanley simply do not incorporate enough misdirection to
carry off the surprise. That is especially problematic, since they have
stripped away most of the idiosyncrasy of Amis’s novel, opting to focus on the D.O.A.-ish noir plot-strand.
To
give you an idea how long Fields has
been held up, way back when it went into production, it was still considered a
good idea to have Amber Heard and Johnny Depp in the same film. Depp is
strangely uncredited, but that is probably for the best, considering his recent
career setbacks. Frankly, he and Jim Sturgess are cringe-inducingly embarrassing
as Talent and Chick Purchase, his pimped-out loan shark and professional darts
nemesis. Admittedly, Heard is stuck with an underwritten character in Six, but
at least she makes a credibly smoldering femme fatale. Theo James fares
somewhat better than Sturgess as the shallow and easily manipulated Clinch, even
though he is rather bland and forgettable.
In
contrast, Billy Bob Thornton is unusually restrained as Young, but he still
manages to chew a good bit of scenery. Frankly, Jason Isaacs largely steals the
show, which is kind of sad, because most of his work as Asprey comes via voice
messages to Young, sort of like the opening answering machine gag that always
launched the Rockford Files credits.
To
give credit where it is due, cinematographer Guillermo Navarro makes all look
fabulously noir and stylish. The electronic score credited to Toydrum, Benson Taylor,
and Adam Barber is also percussively propulsive, sounding quite appealingly influenced
by Birdman and earlier crime jazz.
Unfortunately, any viewer with any pop culture savvy will be way ahead of this film,
which gives them plenty of time to lose patience with the shtickiness of Depp
and Sturgess. It is not nearly as hideous as it is cracked up to be, but London Fields still isn’t recommended
when it opens today (10/26) in New York, at the AMC Empire.
