Scorching British thriller Red Riding is must-see TV for the big screen
by Sean L. Maloney
There's really no arguing that the epic British neo-noir trilogy Red Riding, a true-crime thriller that's become one of the year's arthouse events, is best viewed in one sitting. Maybe five hours of complex, time-shifting narrative, gut-wrenching degeneracy and thick-as-pudding Yorkshire accents seems like a cinematic endurance contest — let's just say your knuckles will hurt at the very sight of handcuffs by the time it's over — but it's tough not to feel like a champion cinephile by the time the final credits roll. Red Riding is, hands down, the most intense crime drama to hit screens in ages — and if you flinched at the phrase "hands down," you know exactly what we're talking about.
Originally aired as a miniseries on the U.K.'s Channel 4, the Red Riding trilogy delivers the kind of satisfaction you get from watching a TV show's entire season in one Red Bull-stoked marathon. Based on David Peace's quartet of novels by the same name, a fictionalized version of real events, each installment takes place in a different year (1974, 1980, 1983). A different director helms each installment in media progressing from 16mm film to HD video: Julian Jarrold (Becoming Jane), James Marsh (the Oscar-winning documentary Man on Wire) and Anand Tucker (Hilary and Jackie).
That's the simple part. Despite the breadth of the material and the craftsmen, this immersion in criminal bacteriology forms a striking and coherent whole, courtesy of screenwriter Tony Grisoni (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas). But divining the fable's moral center is another matter all together. Once the film begins and we enter the cigarette-stained world of Northern England in the 1970s, nothing is so easily parsed.
If you're a fan of The Wire's kick-'em-while-they're-writhing-on-the-floor-from-a-broken-ribcage style of law enforcement, then Red Riding is right up your police-procedural alley. The story begins in Jarrold's 1974 with crime reporter and King Crimson fan Eddie Dunford (played by the magnificent Andrew Garfield, who just might make the upcoming Facebook biopic The Social Network worth watching) as he investigates a string of missing girls — only to discover a web of corruption so vile and contemptible it takes another two feature-length films just to grasp its awfulness.
Marsh's 1980 picks up with Bill Molloy — veteran character actor Warren Clarke, whom you may recognize as a droog named Dim from A Clockwork Orange — expressing sympathy for the motives of the so-called Yorkshire Ripper on national TV. Which might not be a problem, except that Molloy is in charge of the Ripper investigation for the West Yorkshire police. This brings in Mancunian detective Peter Hunter, played by Hot Fuzz's Paddy Considine, who proceeds to unravel a web of lies, infidelity and murder — and that's just the good guys! We're not even going to get into what the bad guys (worse guys?) get into — this is a family paper and we like to save that sort of lascivious behavior for the news section, where spoilers are a bit more appropriate.
The stockpile of sin that makes up the first two films comes to a head in Tucker's 1983, kicking off with a Lost-worthy whut-the-huh flashback before following Det. Maurice Jobson (David Morrissey) and washed-up lawyer John Piggott (Mark Addy) on a violent and soul-wrenching path to redemption, against deeply entrenched forces of evil on all sides. Are you following all this? No? Good. If you're going to commit to five hours of good people doing bad things and bad people doing worse things, you should have the benefit of figuring out the scope of horror and human cruelty for yourself. The resolution is brutal, but totally worth it.
If you can't commit to spending the better part of a day watching the trilogy in one sitting (an option available on both Saturday and Sunday), you'll be able to catch individual episodes during the course of the week-long engagement. Passes for all three episodes will be available at the box office.
Email arts@nashvillescene.com.
Comments (0)