Lenny Abrahamson (2012)
My prejudices meant that I found the lifestyle of Richard and his friends depressing long before the event occurs that turns their world upside down. It wasn’t fundamentally the affluence of these sexually and socially confident teenagers that I backed away from – although being well off adds to their apparent self-assurance, and so makes them worse. Jack Reynor is physically well cast as Richard Karlsen. With his sharp blue eyes and snout, Reynor exudes a sense of fleshy entitlement. A good-looking star of the first fifteen at his Dublin school, Richard is clearly someone to be reckoned with when he gets aggressive – and this proves to be the case, with lethal results. There are unambiguous foreshadowings at an early stage of What Richard Did: Lenny Abrahamson punctuates the scenes of the kids enjoying each other’s company and messing around with the occasional hostile, avid glint in Richard’s eye as he watches his rugby teammate Conor (Sam Keeley) and his girlfriend Lara (Roisin Murphy) together. Richard likes the look of Lara and therefore thinks he has a right to her. I found Richard not only intimidating but, although it’s hard on the excellent Jack Reynor to say this, repellent.
Although it’s plain to see what Richard did, it’s often harder to hear what he says. His inaudibility is the downside of the fine naturalistic acting that Abrahamson gets, from Reynor especially and from nearly everyone else in the film: Roisin Murphy and Patrick Gibson, as the rookie in the rugby team, are particularly good. The playing of Lars Mikkelsen (Mads’s brother), as Richard’s father Peter, is a little more theatrical. Peter decides to cover up what his son did; his guilty sobs at a memorial service for the ill-fated Conor (a relatively melodramatic scene all round) are enough to draw unwanted attention to him. Mikkelsen is strong, though, in the sequence in which Richard admits responsibility for Conor’s death. He didn’t mean to kill him although he did mean to kick him in the head.
His mother (Lorraine Pilkington) thinks Richard can do no wrong: she’s never seen again in the film once her son confesses to his father. This striking omission is probably intentional. Given the way Peter is behaving, Abrahamson and the screenwriter Malcolm Campbell (who has written mainly for television) would need to show the mother’s not noticing something’s up with her husband or her reaction to what he tells (or doesn’t tell) her: either would be an inconvenient complication. Campbell’s screenplay is adapted from a 2008 novel Bad Day in Blackrock by Kevin Power. This was inspired by a real-life crime, the killing of a boy called Brian Murphy, kicked to death by school friends outside a Dublin night club in 2000. Murphy’s death occurred when the Irish economy was riding high. It’s possible that What Richard Did is set in this recent past but, if so, I didn’t pick that up and assumed it to be describing the Dublin of today; as a consequence, the emphasis on the characters’ material wealth – it seems that Peter Karlsen works in the financial sector – is a little surprising.
I’ve read a couple of reviews of What Richard Did, by Philip French and Hannah McGill, which suggest that it’s an allegory about the financial decline of Ireland. It’s hard to believe that anyone watching the film, other than a fully-briefed critic, would receive it as such but McGill adduces as evidence the fact that Richard’s father, who helps conceal his son’s crime, is Danish and that ‘Denmark helped to bail Ireland out with a €400 million bilateral loan in 2010’! I hope this isn’t what Lenny Abrahamson had in mind. But even if it was, and although I didn’t like this film, I’ll look out for what Lenny does next.
19 January 2013
