England Is Mine
‘Life, in its humdrum way, is something definitely worth avoiding’, or something like that, is the drawl of an opening line falling out of Jack Lowden’s mouth, as a depressive teenage Steven Patrick Morrissey in Mark Gill’s England is Mine. The film follows Smiths’ frontman through his late teenage years, leading up to the point at which he meets Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, played by Laurie Kynaston. This is probably the least interesting period of the prophetic singers’ life; he gets a job, makes a friend, quits his job, and doesn’t get a record deal (same).
The film, like Morrissey, is dreary, but lacking in humour or self awareness. I can’t imagine how it would be to someone who wasn’t a fan. I walked in there, ‘Moz’ tattooed foot first, ready to be very forgiving; though by one particularly excruciating scene of our teenage Smiths frontman and his feminist artist friend Linder (Jessica Brown Findley) talking to each other in Keats and Wilde quotes my patience is wearing thin. It’s all too much, and 90% of the time I find a superiority complex charming. We see our best performance from Katherine Pierce as Anji, who is with us for the first quarter of the film, but for all she could do she could not save it.
Having said this, the film, stylistically, was almost bleakly beautiful. Shots of the sea, the beach, the urbane, littered the film with the drab stillness which captured the Manchester of young Morrissey’s lyric. We return to the water, to the factory buildings, to the houses of Rusholme. These scenes were backdropped by a good - but not important enough - soundtrack. Enter Steven in a New York Dolls t shirt, hitting himself in the head with a microphone (sounds more exciting than it is).
The Morrissey of England is Mine wouldn’t be seen dead topless rolling around on a cliff licking chocolate bars, so what kind of Morrissey is he? This man is a gift to film makers -- something went terribly wrong.
3/10
