This Is England

After transforming the bucolic English countryside into a site of horror with the nasty revenge tale Dead Man's Shoes, Shane Meadows turns to Maggie Thatcher's England with a skinhead coming-of-age story. This is England starts out as well-acted and superbly designed mid-eighties time-capsule but degenerates to a formulaic conclusion that cheapens everything that went before.

The film appropriately opens with a montage of Princess Diana's fairytale wedding, aerobics videos, and the Falklands war. In an unnamed Northern town in 1983, twelve-year-old Shaun (Thomas Turgoose) grows up fighting the odds: he lost his father in the war, his mother's wearing an impossible perm, and at school, he is picked on for his ridiculously out-of-fashion bell bottoms.

This is England begins as an unflinching story about making friends in a desolate time and place. Turgoose is a mesmerizing screen presence: midget-sized but full of piss and vinegar, he is perched right at the cusp of childhood, with a seriousness and fury that all too often betray his diminishing storehouse of innocence. He's a kid yet, but trying his best to hide it. When Woody (Joseph Gilgun) and his gang of skinheads take him under their wing, Shaun can't play it cool. "This was the best day of my life!" he gushes after they take him on a raid vandalizing empty houses wearing silly get ups. Woody, Milky (Andrew Shim) and the others outfit him with shirt and suspenders, Shaun gets his head shaved and talks mom into buying him a pair of kick-arse Doc Martens. In the shed behind the house, he makes out with a much older girl (Vicky McClure) who looks like a runner-up in a Cindi Lauper look-alike contest.

The story takes a turn for the worse when an old friend of Woody's returns after three years in jail. Combo (Stephen Graham) is a tougher, meaner breed of skinhead, less interested in ska and hanging out with girls than in virulent nationalism and xenophobia. With the studied manipulation of a true demagogue, Combo breaks up Woody's little gang and takes over, waving St. George's Cross. Combo himself is a mess of pop psychology, somewhat reductively defined by secret romantic frustration, but his sway over Shaun is painful to witness. Likable Woody excuses himself from the film, and in no time, the boy has a a new father figure, a new ideology, and a new set of enemies: the "pakis" who are now targets to be insulted via graffiti, threatened in playgrounds, and robbed in their own stores. Once bullied, Shaun now has found it safer to become a bully himself.

This is England could have ended there, as a kind of prequel to A Clockwork Orange, but Meadows isn't content with telling a simple cautionary tale. Instead, he takes the movie through a predictable crisis to an unconvincing redemption and a final montage that sketches an insufficiently explored turnaround. With a symbolic gesture set to a plaintive Smiths tune, Shaun renounces his nationalist leanings, and whatever rang true about him is sublimated entirely into the stuff of movies. That's not England, that's pure Hollywood.