If you have been following recent British Cinema, you probably have
the general impression that the UK only exports two types of movies:
Type A: Cold new-style gangster pics replete with ultraviolence,
black humor, heavy working class accents, colorful urban slang, sudden
tone shifts, and lots of modern editing and photographic gimmicks -
pace shifts, speed-ups and -downs, freeze-frames, extreme color
saturation, and so forth. The prototype is Lock, Stock and Two Smoking
Barrels.
Type B: Warm small-town stories about eccentric provincials,
centered around one individual or small group struggling to be
accepted while doing something unconventional: grannies growing weed,
boys aspiring to ballet careers, housewives stripping for charity
calendars, and so forth. If Dickens were still alive, he would be
writing about these people instead of the city folks who were the
colorful eccentrics of his own time. The prototype here is The Full Monty.
Although Clubland is an Australian film, it is driven by British
characters, and is a stereotypical British Type B. At age
50-something, an English immigrant (Brenda Blethyn) works in a lowly
food service job in Australia, but has not abandoned the dream of her
youth, a career as a ribald stand-up comic. Several nights a week she
does a vulgar-but-not-too-vulgar act for anyone who will listen. Her
ex-husband is also a two-bit entertainer, a C&W singer who once
actually had a song on the country charts for three weeks. Although
those weeks marked the beginning and end of his time in the big show,
he matches his ex's enthusiasm for performing, and fits every possible
gig around his normal job as a retail security guard. The family is
rounded out by two sons: the sweet, socially awkward young man who
anchors the story, and his brain-damaged but lovable brother.
If the film revolved solely around Brenda Blethyn's character, it
would be a failure, because she is utterly unappealing. Blethyn has
done a very similar character before, in Little Voice, and received an
Oscar nomination for doing it, so there's no doubt that she has it
down to a science, but the character just grates on the viewer's
nerves. She's never really concerned with the happiness of her two
sons, but only wants them to conform to her own personal need for an
unconventional family life and their support of her career dreams. She
treats her shy son's girlfriends with contempt, and does everything
possible to drive a wedge between her sons and the outside world in
order to keep them in her cocoon. Her ex-husband seems like a
genuinely good person, but she treats him with the disgust normally
reserved for poisonous snakes near the family pets. Her performing is
exactly what you would expect from a woman who has been at it for
decades without success. Her lame act seems like one of those
nostalgia acts where an old-timer does his familiar vintage routines
to bring back memories for his fellow codgers. She's like the elderly
Sinatra performing My Way for those who remembered when the song first
came out. But there's a big difference. Sinatra was resting on his
laurels, and this character has no laurels to rest upon. With no
material, no laurels, and a generally unpleasant personality, she's
obviously destined to spend the rest of her life playing at rest homes
and Shriner conventions, but she doesn't realize that because her
schtick seems to work just fine in the rooms she plays. Then she gets
her big chance at an important audition and the suits find her act
uninspiring. That cold blast of reality sets her off on a binge of
booze and self-pity in which she abuses everyone around her even more
than usual. It's a standard Dickensian formula. She is Scrooge, while
the soft-spoken, good-natured son is Bob Cratchet and the handicapped
son with a heart of gold is Tiny Tim.
I suppose the ex-husband is the Ghost of Christmas Past. Or maybe
he's Marley. Or maybe I'm stretching my metaphor too far.
Fortunately, her story is only a portion of what the movie has to
offer. The parallel story, which follows the struggle of her sons to
grow up and mingle with the people of the real world, is a pleasant
coming-of-age tale. The "normal" son has to overcome severe shyness
and a bad case of virginity, but he is fortunate enough to latch on to
a girl who has been through enough frogs to spot a prince when she
sees one. The girlfriend not only has to deal with his neurotic
timidity, but also has to compete for his attention against a needy
brother and a mother who wants to hold on to her son by driving away
his girlfriends. This portion of the story, relating how the
girlfriend overcomes all those obstacles to love both a timorous boy
and his spastic brother, is handled with subtlety and such
close-to-the-bone honesty that you think it must be a verbatim
transcription of somebody's own conversations. The warmth and candor
of the coming-of-age story manages to push the mother's sloppy,
pathetic showbiz dreams into the background. That's a good thing,
because mom's mid-life crisis is incapable of carrying a film, but suffices to
provide some spice for the kids' somewhat bland romance.
In order to complete the Dickensian portion of the tale, the
Blethyn character, like Scrooge or The Grinch, needed some redemption, so the film's
finale gave her a chance to say "What day is this?," and her son a
chance to respond "My wedding day, sir ... er ... mum," whereupon she
ordered everyone an enormous goose, sang a song with her ex-, and
allowed the crippled boy to say "God Bless Us Every One."
