 |
| Written by Generoso Fierro |
A few years back, I was delighted to meet High-Rise producer Jeremy Thomas after the panel discussion of his career during the 2008 Coolidge Award, which is given by Brookline’s Coolidge Corner Theater.
To honor the maverick film producer that night, a dais was comprised of Thomas himself, actors Debra Winger and Tim Roth, screenwriter Mark Peploe, and legendary director, Nicolas Roeg, all who discussed their experiences working with Thomas, who received many an accolade that night for his unwavering determination in producing non-commercial projects that fall more on the risque side.
From early efforts like Jerzy Skolimowski’s 1978 occult film, The Shout, to Nicolas Roeg’s massively underrated psychological drama from 1980, Bad Timing, to David Cronenberg’s unfairly maligned adaptation of William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch, to Ben Wheatley’s new film, High-Rise, which was adapted by Wheatley’s life and screenwriting partner Amy Jump from the novel by J.G. Ballard, Thomas has always produced from the gut.
As a huge fan of Nicolas Roeg myself, I asked Jeremy Thomas that evening about his experience working with Roeg on Bad Timing and Insignificance and asked if he had ever wanted to work with Roeg again, and that is when Thomas mentioned adapting Ballard’s High-Rise, which Roeg had wanted to direct even before the pair had collaborated together, but regrettably at that time, the book had been optioned out by someone else.
Since that conversation we had back in 2008, there had been rumbles about a Thomas produced High-Rise coming to fruition with different directors but nothing concrete existed until the announcement that Wheatley, a young director whom I greatly admire, would finally get the chance to bring his interpretation of the book to screen, and after seeing the film twice in the last two weeks, I, for one, am so happy that he did.
When I started to imagine a Wheatley version of the Ballard novel, it had occurred to me that Ben Wheatley’s films have always been set in a specific time and place such as the National Tramway Museum or a war torn field in 17th century England, and in contrast, the novels of Ballard have always seemed to exist without a set place in time.
But, what becomes the strongest link between the two creators and what eventually makes High-Rise such a successful adaptation is the unique ability to cleverly and even comedically point out the ugliest aspects of human beings, no matter of the era that is being examined. I was also somewhat concerned going in due to Wheatley’s penchant for splashing a touch of gore around as he did in The Kill List and Sightseers, and given the physical combative class conflict scenes in Ballard’s novel, I worried about the potential for a floor to floor bloodbath that would overwhelm the viewer with the “red, red groovy” at the cost of the smaller observations so precious to the original source material.
What does transpire on screen is a clear restraint by Wheatley; the violence does not overcome the narrative and characters. Though Wheatley teases his audience with the potential of a bloodsoaked film in an early scene in which our anti-hero Dr. Laing (who is skillfully underplayed by Tom Hiddleston in a part he was seemingly born to play, unlike his recent failed attempt to capture Hank Williams in I Saw The Light) peels the face off of a cadaver to straighten out the smirking of a young cocky intern. This moment, and the use of a “three months later” scene at the beginning of the film that seems to have been pulled from Cannibal Holocaust, sets a tone of a class struggle, but the struggle will play out in a different way than the setup leads you to believe.
Set in the pre-Thatcher England of the 1970s, the setup seems clear, the higher you are allowed to live on the titular Brutalist monstrosity, the better you must be doing in terms of wealth and status. But, this is not a film about that era’s class struggle, but one on the conflict between people and the conditions in which they live based on more than birth privilege. An early encounter at a party between Laing and Charlotte Melville (played by the perfectly boozy and onpoint Sienna Miller) where she describes Laing’s rental application as “very Byronic” indicates that the tenant selection will be based on more than just bank account and title. Another scene in which Laing is bruskly escorted out of a party thrown in the penthouse apartment of the building’s architect, Anthony Royal (Jeremy Irons) not for being poorly dressed but for not following the attire of the party’s Louis the XIV theme indicates that whether upper or lower class, what becomes clear is that anyone can instantly become undesirable.
The building soon becomes a symbol of rebellion of the individual and not of class with the most threatening element being the loose cannon inside of lower level resident Wilder (Luke Evans), a beefy BBC documentarian who wishes to make a program about the inadequacies of the building that he witnesses. As Laing proudly states towards the end of the film to the building’s hierarchy, “Wilder may be the sanest man in the entire building.”
High-Rise succeeds with great wit and deft attention to the smallest visual details, which is less about the Kubrickian adoration that critics attach to every English film these days (there are other directors folks) and more about the small moments that propel the narrative into a glorious madness.
Some eight years after I spoke with Jeremy Thomas, I had the fortunate opportunity to speak with director Ben Wheatley this past Monday about High-Rise, beginning with a question I had about one piece of set design that baffled me on my first viewing...
Read more »
