Submarine
- Year:2010
- Rating:M
- Director:Richard Ayoade
- Cast:Paddy Considine , Craig Roberts , Sally Hawkins, Noah Taylor
- Release Date:September 08, 2011
- Distributor:Madman
- Running time:97 minutes
- Film Worth:$17.50
- FILMINK rates movies out of $20 - the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Mining similar narrative and stylistic territory to Wes Anderson, this weird and wonderful comedy drama still feels brilliantly unique.
Shamelessly derivative but kind of brilliant, Submarine is a wonderfully weird comedy drama of adolescent discovery and angst. Wes Anderson (and others) has already covered similar territory, but director Richard Ayoade skillfully and affectionately makes it fresh with a bundle of clever directorial touches.
There are full-screen title cards, jump-cuts, and non-linear edits that seem to riff on Jean Luc-Godard. There's a reoccurring beach motif that invokes François Truffaut's The 400 Blows. And there's the non-specific period details of cassette tapes, hand-written notes and Polaroid cameras - it's probably the early eighties, but is stylistically closer to the French New Wave heyday of the sixties. Fortunately, there's also a dollop of Ayoade's own deadpan humour, which will be familiar to anyone who's seen him in the UK sitcom, The IT Crowd, and especially the under-appreciated mad genius of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace (which he co-created and directed).
Much of Ayoade's dry wit is evident in the character of Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts, brilliant and droll), a fifteen-year old, Welsh-coast school boy with a crush on the feisty Jordana (Yasmin Paige). He's a selfish control freak, and narrates the film as if he himself were directing it. Jordana is no less iconoclastic; she sports an Anna Karina-bob and likes to hang out at grimy industrial estates, lest she feel anything remotely sentimental or romantic. Oliver is especially loveable in his enterprising-teenager kind of way, even when he's recklessly trying to save his parents' fizzling marriage. His dad (Noah Taylor) is a depressed fish expert, while mum (Sally Hawkins) is tempted by a crackpot ex-lover, a mullet-clad hippie who owns a gaudy van advertising his status as a new-age guru. Hawkins and Taylor are just beautiful, neurotic and sad in the best way, and they supply much of the film's considerable warmth and wry humour.
