Young Adam
Around the time that Joe (Ewan McGregor) does the nasty with the sister (Therese Bradley) of his married lover (Tilda Swinton) in an alleyway, you've already mentally retitled "Young Adam" "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Sexaholic." Seriously, here's where the disaffected writer-turned-bargehand has sex during the course of this film: on a path, on the beach, in the barge, under a train, in a boat (not with a goat), covered with custard, in a bed. Coming as it does toward the end of "Adam," that last one is particularly shocking.
It's a grim little pint of existential bitter, this one, a sort of Scottish "The Stranger" that teeters between the sublime and the unintentionally silly. "Young Adam" is based on a 1957 novel by the little-known Alexander Trocchi (1925-1984), a Beat writer from Scotland who has been likened to William S. Burroughs and Charles Bukowski. The film lacks the amoral inquisitiveness of the former's work, though, and the active interest in degradation of the latter's. Screenwriter-director Patrick Mackenzie simply turns his camera on Joe as the young man tries to obliterate himself through sex.
We first see Joe and his boss, Les (Peter Mullan), as they pull a woman's body out of the River Clyde one morning. The discovery is mentioned in the papers, a high point for the inarticulate Les. Joe's response is to lyrically imagine the girl's suicide jump, a hint that he's a slumming intellectual.
If so, he has given up on the life of the mind. Joe and Les's wife, Ella (Swinton), stalk each other like bored cats, coupling furiously whenever they get a moment alone. Swinton can be a fierce screen presence, and Ella is her most slatternly role: a stringy, rawboned nag only briefly lit up by physical passion. This isn't an affair, it's rut.
Joe wants nothing more. Actually, he wants less. In flashback, we watch his relationship with pretty young Cathie Dimly (Emily Mortimer) skitter along the waves of his lusts; eventually it sinks. He tells her he's off to China, which only means he wants to get as far away from this world as possible.
On the barge there's only Les, Ella, and their young son Jim (Jack McElhone), and the world intrudes only where they touch the shore. "Young Adam" was filmed in summer, and the tree-lined banks of the Clyde have an effulgent green glow that almost offsets the gray industrial skies. There's ripeness here, but not among the people.
Joe does move on from Ella and settles obliquely (and carnally) in town, where he follows the trial of the young man accused of the dead girl's murder. McGregor gives us a placid, amorally charming surface, but we see something gnawing at him: whether a life lived with scrupulous selfishness -- with attention to only animal needs -- can be called life at all.
"Young Adam" unfolds with an absolute minimum of dramatic highs and lows, and it's so disaffected that it prompts laughter at the wrong moments (usually when Joe is having his way with another bored conquest). The film is explicit enough to have earned an NC-17 rating, but that's hardly a come-on: this may be one of the least erotic films about shagging ever made. Mackenzie points out a vast disconnect between sex and pleasure -- and points it out again and again.
But the acting is tucked in, clever, serious -- no qualms there. Mullan, the writer-director of "The Magdalene Sisters," turns Les into an affectingly curious figure: a cuckold who regains his pride. Swinton seethes and gropes, ultimately settling into a sad yearning for domesticity. McGregor gives nothing away; he's likable and appalling, and, in the end, the two fuse inextricably. "Young Adam" -- the title is unexplained and most likely biblical -- follows a young man aching for knowledge and heading for a fall, and it's present at the horrible moment when he arrives at both.
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