YOUNG ADAM
A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 2004 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): **
YOUNG ADAM will leave you with questions, not about the story, which is paper-thin and relatively uneventful, but about why the MPAA slapped an NC-17 on it. Yes, there is frequent nudity and sex -- usually of dark, murky images of humans emitting low grunts of passion -- but the movie is no more explicit than hundreds of other films which were awarded the much more marketable R rating. Actually the quantity of sex in the story becomes something of an unintentional joke since every woman -- married or not -- that Joe Taylor (Ewan McGregor) meets has sex with him not long after they meet. A quiet, working-class bloke who smokes too much, Joe doesn't exactly look or act like God's gift to women. Why they all throw themselves at him is never clear.
As the story opens, Joe and his boss, Les Gault (Peter Mullan), are nonchalantly fishing a dead body out of the river. The two guys work on a coal barge owned by Les's wife, Ella (Tilda Swinton). Since she is female, Joe will, of course, have lots of sex with her, usually as her husband and young son, Jim (Jack McElhone), are just barely out of eyesight. Emily Mortimer plays Cathie Dimly, the only single woman in Joe's active love life. The story flashes backwards and forwards until it ends fairly inconsequentially.
In the press notes, director David Mackenzie describes the story as an "amoral moral tale." I suppose. The only striking and memorable part of the production is the stunning cinematography by Giles Nuttgens. His blue-gray outdoor shots of the barge plying the narrow Scottish waterways perfectly evoke the period of the drab and dreary 1950s, when the story is set. You may remember his work from a significantly better Swinton film, THE DEEP END. Now that was a thriller that resonated with the audience. YOUNG ADAM tries some of the slow rhythms of THE DEEP END, but the latter film was much more successful in drawing us into the narrative. YOUNG ADAM is just a handsome dud that serves only to generate more questions about its NC-17 rating and the MPAA's inconsistent judgment.
YOUNG ADAM runs 1:33. It is rated NC-17 for "some explicit sexual content" and would be acceptable for older teenagers.
The film opens nationwide in the United States on Friday, April 30, 2004. In the Silicon Valley, it will be showing at the Camera Cinemas.
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