Brighton Rock

This week I went to see Brighton Rock with a few friends. I am a huge fan of the book and studied it last year at AS level so I was really looking forward to seeing what this new adaptation was like. I had only read bad reviews of the film and so wasn’t expecting much but was still excited to see the film and actually I was generally pleased with most of it.

I thought that the choice to set the classic gangster novel in 1960’s Brighton was genius and the mods and rockers riots worked really well with the violent nature of the story. The cinematography and the look of the film were really good and I thought that the film really looked like it was filmed in the sixties and some of the shots were beautiful. I also really liked the fact that the gruesome and violent parts of the story were stuck to and Pinkie’s death was really effective. The burning of his skin with acid was horrible but amazing and the final shot of him as a crumpled mess at the bottom of the cliff was both disturbing and powerful.

Sam Riley was a very good Pinkie and really captured the confusion of the angry young man and there were very strong moments of him revealing the disturbed psychotic nature of the character’s personality. However, I thought that Pinkie disgust towards Rose wasn’t focused on enough but aside from that he was very well played.

Rose was equally good and I thought Andrea Riseborough really captured her blinding love for Pinkie. Also, I thought her look was very effective; she did come across as the slightly dowdy and dishevelled woman and Riseborough was particularly good at showing her naivety and youth in a way which highlighted Pinkie’s too.

Unfortunately for me the character of Ida wasn’t brilliant though. Helen Mirren is obviously an amazing actress and an icon but maybe this is why she didn’t work as Ida for me. In my head she is the slightly drunk, cheerful motherly figure for Hale and for me this just didn’t come across but it didn’t really take that much away from the film which was good. Also, I wasn’t too sure about Andy Serkis’s Colleoni and felt perhaps he wasn’t as gangstery or powerful as he could’ve been. However, I do think that maybe the period it was set in meant some of these almost stereotypical characters wouldn’t have fitted in that well so I do understand some of the toning down of their characteristics.

I also did like the other members of Pinkie’s mob though and thought that Spicer, Dallow and Cubitt all held their parts well and each added something to the screen be it humour, tension or whatever else.

So all in all it had been a really good film and stuck fairly close to the book but had enough effective alterations to make it something in its own right but for me it all came down to how Rowan Joffe dealt with the iconic ending. The ending of the novel is probably one of my favourite ends to a novel ever when Rose goes off to listen to the record and will inevitably find out the truth about what Pinkie thought of her and the first time I read it, it gave me a kind of sick and at the same time spine chilling feeling. Then, the original film changed the ending to Rose not finding out because the record skips and Rose only hears Pinkie say ‘I love you’ and I understand why they did it in the 1947 version to give a happy ending because it was right for the time. However, when it got to the final scene of this edition I was so disappointed they did the same thing. It actually made me quite angry and I couldn’t believe that this film which up to then had been one which had so much potential for me to be one of the best films I’d seen in ages ruined it by not taking advantage of the amazing ending in the novel.

However, apart from that it was a brilliantly made film and I would recommend it and was most certainly not a waste of time or money which I think is always a plus point to a film!