25 Years Later: Nil By Mouth

Director: Gary Oldman
Starring: Ray Winstone, Kathy Burke, Charlie Creed-Miles
Running time: 128 minutes

There is perhaps no finer conduit for this hostility than the great Ray Winstone, who has always seemed to be the quintessential embodiment of that British hard-man masculinity. His Raymond feels like an amalgamation of a man we've all been subjugated to, one way or another. He holds us hostage with perpetual anecdotes about the women he's conquered, the gear he's sniffed and the heads he's smashed in. He'll leave the house suited and booted and tell his wife he's out 'on business'- the business of going out on the lash, lap dances and lines. Rinse and repeat. As midlife approaches, he’s running off of the fumes of these weekend benders, and the hazy memories of glory days in an existence that seems to be totally dictated by pent up hostility. 

Nil By Mouth is claustrophobic, loud and angry. There's Val who is the picture of exacerbation. She has a 5-year-old girl with Raymond, and another one on the way. Although she is visibly ground down by circumstance, she never loses her sense of humor. Kathy Burke gives a shattering performance that is simultaneously devastating and defiant. Val's brother Billy is a junkie. When he's not loitering on a street corner waiting for his next fix, he's floating between households, and when he's outstayed his welcome he crashes in an alley or someone's garage. Then there's Jil, Val and Billy's mother. Widowed but never lonely, she's the adhesive needed to keep this family with her consolations falling apart with her knee jerk cuppa offerings or a spare fag. She threatens to kill with kindness when she enables Billy's drug habit, buckling under his demands for money, and even taxying him to his next score. 

By the time of its release, Gary Oldman has established himself as one of the finest character actors of his generation, and Nil by Mouth is a fascinating directorial debut. Although his film is by no means autobiographical, it's plain to see he grew up around these people; there's an obvious assimilation of The Big Smoke. Oldman chooses to cover his subjects with a rugged documentary style that is both as unpredictable and as volatile as the domestic chaos it depicts; the film's style befitting of a body of work as schizophrenic as its director. 

Even when he's not on screen, Raymond feels as omnipresent as the gray clouds which hang over London, and the tension that this creates finally comes to a harrowing, monstrously violent head. It's not long until the film descends into a feverish hellscape of toxic masculinity, an alcohol and jealousy induced exorcism of the demons that have been dogging Raymond since his childhood. Running parallel is Billy's own existential crisis as his drug habits consume his life, the constant seesawing of getting well and withdrawal landing him in hot water. The film's drama pivots on some truly revelatory monologues pinpointing the two men's paternal trauma; the sins of the father are to be laid upon the children. 

25 years later and it's clear how emphatically Oldman nails the fundamentals of a social realist piece; he makes his audience blush with the second-hand embarrassment one feels when they're invading privacy. There's not a single line of dialogue, feels contrived, not a single family interaction feels manufactured or a single performance with a false note. Every puff of a fag hits the back of our throat as if we ourselves were chugging it, and every cup of tea envelops our mouth bringing back memories of familial bonds. Packed with London colloquialisms, some of the patter went over my head, but its viscerality hit me with a cinematic sucker punch to the gut which I haven't received in years.

Did you know? The word "fuck" and its variations are used 428 times, an average of 3.34 times per minute.