Better Things Details

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[Highly rated reviewer]

As not approved by the Cotswolds Tourist Board

Finding Hopkins' well thought of short 'Love me or leave me alone' a Poundstretcher bag of yoof cliches, I was wary of seeing this. But he's a young Brit who's just not that into Hollywood so you've got to support him.I watched with around 30 others at the ICA..well 27 by the time it finished as obviously some people were expecting 'Trainspotting: The Chipping Camden Years'. The film is a salad of stories based in a rural village. It revolves around young drug users, octogenarians and an agraphobic nicotine addict so is hardly going to get Jerry Bruckheimer reaching for his cheque book. Its artistry and empathy for its resolutely unglamorous characters puts it alongside the work of Lynn Ramsay, Andrea Arnold, Robert Besson, though more stylised. There is precisely one joke. It plays with sound and uses editing in a very deliberate way. The lighting is often dramatic. Hopkins also employs landscape to give you that profound melancholic shiver that only wind in trees on a stormy English Thursday afternoon in late October can provide.

Those atmospheres and the feeling of people trying to combat the 'nothing' with drugs, sex, computer games, fast driving, music, books, cigarettes, memories are what the film is 'about'. He gets good performances from his largely non-pro cast ( one of whom has subsequently died as a result of drug use). He avoids teen caricatures....very difficult with 'realistic' portrayals of teens. Conversations are normal, sometimes even polite. The drug dealer is more housewife than corner boy. He does cut way too often to another 'miserable' face in three quarter profile looking out the window on public transport. And the drug death at the end is predictable and lazy. But overall, he knows what he wants and he has a pretty good idea of how to get it.

Bleak!

A clever and gritty film looking at the lives of various characters.

But it is so so bleak.