By Erin Free
When watching the battering, bruising emotional battlefield that is Nil By Mouth, one can barely stop from bellowing, “Why the hell hasn’t Gary Oldman written and directed another film?” Sure, he’s been busy winning Oscars, but that’s no excuse. With his 1997 directorial debut, Oldman announced himself as a true British authentic, a talent cut from the same coarse cloth as Ken Loach, Lindsay Anderson and Alan Clarke. Perhaps Nil By Mouth was just too personal (Oldman tapped his own dark childhood memories for his terse script, in particular his remembrances of his drunken, abusive father), and once he’d delivered it, Oldman was spent. Who knows – he might end up like Charles Laughton, a British actor-turned-director who helmed only one film, but delivered a masterpiece with The Night Of The Hunter. We would not be taking too much of a gamble by heading to betindex.bet and having a small wager on this.
“The film is a love letter to my father,” Oldman told Time Out. “I’m a recovering alcoholic myself, and I think I drank over him for the best part of 25 years. My passport to manhood was being pushed into the boozer at around fourteen or fifteen; you’d stand at the bar, order light and keg, play darts, fart, swear and slag everybody off. Later on, there were a lot of unresolved issues; I carried a lot of resentment that I couldn’t channel. Then dad died from alcoholism, and there were things I’d never said. So – and I suppose this is where some sentimentality creeps in – the film is like me saying, ‘Wherever you are, I had to resolve this, but I forgive you.’”
The obvious substitute for Oldman’s alcoholic father is Ray Winstone’s big, bullish Ray, a South London hard-man who likes to talk it big and drink it even bigger. He’s also a violent, repulsive bully, who beats his big-hearted wife (the brilliant Kathy Burke) to within an inch of her life when he stupidly suspects that she might be having an affair, and nearly bites off her junky brother’s nose. Though an ensemble drama, Winstone towers over Nil By Mouth, giving a performance that gets dangerously close to Robert De Niro’s in Raging Bull in terms of pure, voluble force and total immersion. Even topping his seminal 1977 debut in Alan Clarke’s devastating prison drama Scum, Winstone is extraordinary here, and the scene in which the brutish Ray laments his lack of connection with his own father (“Not one kiss. Not one cuddle”) is literally one of the finest pieces of acting ever committed to celluloid.
