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BY MIRIAM RINN
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
MOVIE REVIEW
With mobs of young people terrorizing British cities just a few weeks ago, a remake of “Brighton Rock,” updated to 1964 with Mods and Rockers battling in the streets, feels creepily contemporary. Based on a novel by Graham Greene, this sleekly entertaining film noir features Sam Riley as Pinkie Brown, a teenage thug who aims to become the leader of his gang of small-time hoods in the British seaside town. Riley, who can look coldly frightening as well as vulnerable and boyish, portrays Pinkie as a cynical manipulator and believing Catholic who is convinced that he’s doomed to hell. In Pinkie’s theology, hell is real, heaven is a fairy tale. Since his destiny is sealed, he might as well make the most of his time on earth.
Writer/director Rowan Joffe, (screenwriter for “The American” and “28 Weeks Later“) and cinematographer John Mathieson give the film a great look — almost-sepia-toned dingy interiors in contrast to the bright, sunny beachfront exteriors — and capture an environment where small, mean people struggle to make it in a country in decline. There’s nothing heroic or outsized about these characters, even though several, particularly the women, take great risks to do what they believe is the right thing.
When we first see Pinkie, he’s hanging back as his friends go about their criminal business. Then Pinkie’s mentor is accidentally killed, and Pinkie swears revenge on the responsible party, Fred Hale. That first murder guarantees Pinkie’s eternal damnation, and it sets him on a path of greater and greater destructiveness. Hale’s disappearance piques the concern of Ida (the always wonderful Helen Mirren) who knew Fred casually, and she begins to look into the matter. Ida owns a tea shop, where teenage Rose (Andrea Riseborough) is a waitress, and coincidentally, Rose is the one person who might discredit Pinkie‘s alibi. In a wonderful scene where Pinkie sits down at Rose’s table to charm her into meeting him later, he exudes all the adolescent danger and sexuality that frightened the adult world in the 1960s and totally bewitches the homely, masochistic Rose. Like the proverbial moth, she can’t resist his cold flame.
