This is England
— Hard-boiled sufferation: star turn from a young actor - the kid stays in the picture.”
- Director: Shane Meadows
- United Kingdom, 2006
Meadows deals in that other half of Britain you don’t see in Richard Curtis movies. Unlike the romantic dilemmas of Curtis’ articulate, middle-class characters played out against an aspirational London skyline, Shane Meadows’ hard-boiled sufferers are troubled by matters of survival and belonging, in the shadow of tower blocks or the murky damp of piss-smelling subways.
In This is England, young Shaun (similar to Shane) must decide between friends and the ideals of the National Front that he’s too young to grasp. It’s 1983 and Shaun’s dad has been killed in the Falklands. Thatcher’s Britain is looking grim. Grainy news footage from the Islands punctuates and attempts to inform the main action.
If the formula of micro story on macro backdrop doesn’t quite work, the acting is excellent. Joseph Gilgun’s Woody is believably quixotic and Stephen Graham’s Combo is complex and electric. Even so, this is Shaun’s England and in bringing him to life, 15 year old Thomas Turgoose simply owns this movie.
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Hello you, I'm Mike Padgett. I'm not a Princeton curator, Knoxville mayoral candidate, Kentuckian pastor or Arizona journalist, I just share the same name. In fact, I am a consultant working in user experience and information design.
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I'm originally from Yorkshire, England but nowadays I live in Belgium. My current favourite Belgian beer is Black Albert.
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