Screen scenes
By Johanna Davy
Aug. 24, 2003 9:00 p.m.
“Once Upon a Time in the Midlands” Sony
Pictures Classics Directed by Shane Meadows
“Once Upon a Time in the Midlands” is a film with a
bit of an identity crisis.
Like “The Full Monty,” it features the struggles of
working class British folk trying to make the most out of their
dreary lives. Like Guy Ritchie films “Snatch” and
“Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,” it has bumbling
criminals who speak in accents almost incomprehensible to an
American audience. But “Midlands” also wants to be a
character-driven drama about relationships, and though it
doesn’t quite succeed, it does paint a sweet portrait of what
it means to be a family.
Rhys Ivans (Hugh Grant’s hilarious roommate in
“Notting Hill”) plays Dek, a sad sack who lives with
Shirley (Shirley Henderson) and her daughter, Marlene (Finn
Atkins). The film opens with Dek proposing on national television
and Shirley turning him down. Her ex Jimmy (Robert Carlyle) sees
the show and decides he wants Shirley back, despite having walked
out on his family three years earlier. There is the slight
complication of Jimmy having stiffed his partners out of their
share in a recent robbery, but this subplot doesn’t really go
anywhere.
The film ultimately comes down to the question of who Shirley
will pick ““ Dek, the loyal, if slightly boring guy,
who’s a great father to her daughter, or Jimmy, the sexy but
unpredictable drifter who has the advantage of being
Marlene’s real father. She makes what we assume is the right
choice, which leads to a nice montage of the family ice skating to
the strains of Sarah Mclachlan’s “Adia”
(haven’t heard that one in a while).
The actors in the film do a nice job, especially the versatile
Ivans, and Atkins, who shows extraordinary promise as a child
actor. The cast makes the most out of a script that seems more fit
for a TV movie than the big screen, but the characters’
determination to make the best of their lives makes this a sweet,
although somewhat disappointing, film.
