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Directed by: Alex Cox Starring: Gary Oldman, Chloe Webb I’ve never been a big fan of movies that try to dramatize the life of a celebrity or historical figure. They almost always end up making the person they’re studying look like some kind of super-human through ridiculous clichés, exaggerated circumstances and forced sentimentality. Sid and Nancy is a little different. It never tries to make the characters look sympathetic or endearing; it just shows them for what they are. They don’t really have any great personal triumphs or moments of brilliance, they just kind of move about through their world and do what people do. It’s almost a coincidence that they’re icons of the punk rock scene, because their characters aren’t really of any great significance at all. The mythology behind them really seems to just be a fabrication by record executives looking to push their product to a culture movement desperate for something or someone to identify with. The film begins with Sid sitting alone in his apartment, after Nancy’s death. He is taken in for questioning by the police, but he appears to be in a state of shock. The movie then movies into a prolonged flashback explaining how the characters met and how their relationship developed. Some of the most important moments of punk rock history are shown, but everything is really just a backdrop to Sid and Nancy’s love affair, which is as unusual as it is symbolic of the punk movement. The film really doesn’t try and follow a specific plot or story arc, it just sort of meanders through various events in a way similar to what Sid and Nancy did. It’s more about trying to capture the experience and atmosphere of the late seventies punk scene, which it does through establishing different characters and a sort of “punk mythology”. In that respect, it seems like it could be a documentary at times, if not for the incredibly stylized way of filming. In addition, though the film seems incredibly honest and natural, it actually takes quite a few liberties with the actual events that it dramatizes, but most keep at least some part of their source material intact. There is very little exposition, which is refreshing and allows for the characters and events around them to develop naturally and without any sense of pretension. I also felt the film did a great job of capturing what punk is and what punk isn’t. Sid is perhaps the perfect mold for punk rock: aloof and impulsive with no genuine core values. When his bass and amp malfunction during a concert, he doesn’t get upset and act like a diva, he just tosses it away and joins in with the audience. On the other hand, Nancy is the ultimate poseur. She is constantly putting on the face of punk rock to try and fit in, but she is an outsider with a different set of values. She complains about things being “unfair” and can’t let go of her defeats, which is the opposite of Sid’s “anything goes” brand of nihilism. She tries to make herself into someone important by latching on to Sid and feeding off of his celebrity, though everyone hates her because she’s such a hypocrite. This critical view of the punk rock scene is similar to the one in another film by Alex Cox, Repo Man, which is about a young kid who becomes a car reposessor to make money. What could be less punk rock than that? Both actors are incredible in their parts. Oldman is like a confused child, clumsily moving about in no specific direction. He does what people tell him to, rarely ever asserting himself or expressing his own thoughts; he’s just there for the ride, someone else is driving. As Nancy, Webb is impossibly irritating. Her voice is like fingernails on a chalkboard, and she’s always blabbering about something unimportant. It’s really hard to like her character, but her performance is incredibly true to what the real Nancy was like, and she captures a lot of the frustrations of the junkie culture very well. It would be hard to understand Sid’s attraction to Nancy without Oldman’s portrayal of the character as someone needing another person to motivate them, even if it’s only means being bossed around. Both actors go beyond simply imitating their characters, and really give meaning and a sense of humanity behind each action. Both were very young actors at the time, and its stunning to see people of relatively little acting experience giving such mature and developed interpretations of real-life figures. A lot of the smaller parts help add to the environment of decay and destruction. Andrew Schofield’s version is Johnny Rotten is pretty interesting. Instead of playing him as the great punk icon, he gives him a touch of pathetic humanity. He has trouble dealing with other people, and though he puts on the tough guy front, he will usually back down sooner than Sid or just give up altogether. It sort of felt like his character was marginalized at times, but given that the film was about Sid and Nancy, it might have been for the best. Courtney Love has a small role as one of Nancy’s American friends. Her appearance in the film has become a historical curiosity given her relationship to Kurt Cobain, which was in many ways similar to Sid and Nancy’s brief time together. The cinematography by Roger Deakins is stunning. The concert footage is incredibly authentic, especially the stuff from the earlier performances when he takes the camera right down into the audience. It makes it seem like you’re really in the middle of a spontaneous event, which is refreshing given that this was made when MTV was getting its start, and how artificial they made music performance seem. The use of color is brilliant as well, especially in the way the bright and colorful exterior world is contrasted with the dark and dull apartment they hole up in to do heroin. He uses a lot of really cold blues and shadows throughout the film, especially in the scenes when they’re just lying around doing drugs. The use of handheld is pretty interesting as well, especially a prolonged shot where Sid and Nancy walk off a boat, past a crowd of people fighting, and up a ramp. It has an ethereal sensibility to it that’s just stunning. Overall, this can be a hard film to like, but and easy one to appreciate. The characters are all pretty obnoxious, and everything they do is pointless and self-destructive, so there’s very little incentive to care about them in the slightest. However, the tender way the love story aspect of the film is handled and the incredibly performances make the film rise above its material, and despite it being incredibly harrowing at times, it has a unique touch of lost humanity and strange sentimentality. RATING: 4.0 PROS: great acting, beautiful cinematography CONS: characters may not appeal to all, wandering story ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091954/
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Aug 25, 2004 23:14
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| # ? Apr 25, 2024 15:34 |
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This is not the kind of film you come back to after you've seen it once or twice. Gary Oldman is great in it, and an inspired piece of casting, but the story is incredibly damned depressing. I also think it lets John Lydon off way too lightly - I can't stand that histrionic twat. It might not be very lofty, but by far my favourite bit of this film is the dialogue with the American fan on the tour bus. "Hey I've written my own punk song. Let me sing it to you: `I wanna job, I wanna real job, I wanna job that pays, I wanna job that satisfies ... my artistic needs.' Whaddya think Sid?" "Stupid oval office." Voted 3.5 PS - the review above mine is pretty much spot on in all regards.
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Aug 27, 2004 21:51
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