England Is Mine

Dir: Mark Gill

2017

****

A film about the childhood of Smiths’ singer Morrissey was never going to be a colourful affair but Mark Gill’s film isn’t quite the melancholic portrait it probably should have been. However, I’m not sure we really need another miserable film about another British pop star. Anton Corbijn’s 2007 biopic of Joy Division front-man Ian Curtis was strong but bleaker than the songs he wrote. Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Nowhere Boy, the story of a young John Lennon just before he met Paul McCartney, may have been factual but it still felt a lot like it was tailored to what people thought it should look like, rather than what it really did look like. England Is Mine – taken from a line in The Smiths’ song ‘Still ill’ (“England is mine, and it owes me a living”) – does at first feel like it was fllowing a similar path to every other British biopic set in England, whether it be in the 1970s or the thirty years before or after. It starts with a captivating visual though of waves entering a dock, with the young Morrissey looking down into it, either transfixed or contemplating a plunge, possibly even both. It’s hard to say whether this is the real Morrissey or not, Jack Lowden is pretty good in his performance but he doesn’t look anything like the singer and I wonder how much of the story you could say the same for. I like The Smiths and I like Morrissey’s solo stuff, I think every fifteen year old has identified with a Smiths lyric and I’m suspicious of anyone who says they never liked them, especially when they were young. There is some truth to what the late great Sean Hughes said about Morrissey (“Everyone grows out of their Morrissey phase…except Morrissey”) but there will always be a part of me (and you, admit it) that will always find staggering beauty in the lyric “If a double-decker bus crashes into us, to die by your side is such a heavenly way to die, and if a 10-ton truck kills the both of us, to die by your side, the pleasure, the privilege is mine”. If you also like the lyric (and don’t pretend you don’t) then there is a lot to England is Mine that you will enjoy. There is a lot to learn about the man himself also, as many of the events covered are well documented as being true and as far as I can tell, the film is ‘unauthorised’ in that none of the Smiths’ songs are featured and Morrissey himself had no part in it. I’m not sure I was ever that interested in how the Smiths formed or what made Morrissey such a miserabilist in the first place but the film kind of suggested otherwise, as by the end of it I was quite glad. I didn’t know of Morrissey’s ‘The Cult’ connection and I never knew just how he and Johnny Marr met. Perhaps the best thing about the film however is just how it depicts depression, anxiety and just how crippling it can be. By the end of the film I thought that if Morrissey can get up and do something amazing, then anyone can. The typical biopic formula fades and the end of the film is a rewarding but beautifully grueling slog. It’s a far more visual film than one would expect from a musical history lesson too, with the work of Stanley Kubrick of all people springing to mind. I love that so much of the film concentrates on the aspects of famous lives that are often overlooked. Morrissey comes from a normal background, the lyric; “I was looking for a job, and then I found a job, and heaven knows , I'm miserable now. In my life, why do I give valuable time to people who don’t care if I live or die?” could only have come from someone who lived a real life and that is shown properly in the film, his life working in an office taking up more than just thirty seconds of run time. I had no expectations for the film, which might have helped, but I really enjoyed it. It’s visually impressive and hangs on to those difficult aspects of the story that most films chose to ignore, which I found commendable.