Five minutes into England is Mine, the following exchange occurs:
“Life’s too short for…“
“Clichés.”
In hindsight, this should be a warning about watching the rest of the film.
This biopic charts the early life of Steven Morrissey from moody, pretentious teen to the moody, pretentious twenty-something that formed The Smiths. Heaven knows he has enough to be miserable about; he’s treading water in soggy 70s Manchester, his parents are divorcing, and he’s forced to get a job when he’d rather be writing snarky letters to the NME and contemplating his own “undiscovered genius.”
Which is pretty much it. Unfortunately, England is Mine severely lacks the dramatic depth, visual artistry, and brutal honesty of, for example, Anton Corbijn’s Ian Curtis biopic Control, or Gus Van Sant’s anti-portrait of Kurt Cobain, Last Days. Morrissey’s possible mental health issues are given little exploration, and even his creative talents are never fully utilised, making for a shallow and unchallenging character study.
A charmless Jack Lowden (Dunkirk) sleepwalks through the lead role like an emo Sheldon Cooper, and Jessica Brown Findlay (Downton Abbey) is wasted as the manic punky dream girl; her sole role is to push the hero to achieve his true potential, with the kind of motivational slogans one usually finds splashed across an Instagram-filtered sunset.
The film struggles to find a consistent tone. It’s essentially a humdrum and lightweight drama with occasional maudlin musings over slow-motion shots of raging rivers and rain-splashed train tracks. The finale also features some well-framed photography, making me wish that debut director Mark Gill had committed to this more poetic style throughout.
Morrissey himself hasn’t been winning any new fans of late, and this film is only preaching to the converted. For Smiths completists only.
England is Mine is released on DVD and VOD on 4th December.
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