‘Filth’ Is Filthy Fun

“This is what a cunt looks like,” says Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson (James McAvoy), photographing his best friend Bladesy (Eddie Marsan) as they holiday together in Hamburg. Bruce is taking a break from secretly screwing over his “polis” colleagues back in Edinburgh in an effort to secure himself a promotion to detective inspector. Bruce will soon drug Bladesy and take him on a tour of Hamburg’s brothels, before the mild-mannered accountant starts to freak out in some ecstasy-induced nightmare. This is hilarious. This is Filth.

Close cousins to Filth are In Bruges and Werner Herzog’s re-imagining of Bad Lieutenant, both of which had moral vacuums for main characters and were similarly contented in their carefree depiction of sex, violence and hardcore drug-use. Filth, however, astoundingly takes it further, and turns out as amusing as the former and more engaging than the latter, even if writer/director Jon S. Baird’s occasionally overly-stylised approach threatens our involvement. But if you can tolerate gags about alcoholism, drug dependency and paedophilia (this is an Irvine Welsh adaptation), then you should find yourself comfortably spiralling along with this Boschian dark comedy.

First off, as a comedy, Filth rivals anything in this (admittedly poor, so far) year for laughs. But the film is first and foremost a character study, and an often disturbing one at that. Coked-up hallucinations and sleep-deprived daydreams inhabited by Bruce’s psychologist (Jim Broadbent, doing some kind of…accent) invade the narrative with precision; they’re bizarre, unsettling reflections of a man’s slipping psyche, inserted by Baird to offset any idea that there’s a chance of the film reaching normality. Those daydreams, set in some inescapable room with Broadbent’s sinister doctor lecturing the ‘hero’ about life, could have escaped from the cutting room floor of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.

James McAvoy, complete with red-raw eyes and Weetabix beard, loses himself to a role slathered in excess. Bruce Robertson is the kind of character that can stretch audience sympathy to its limit, but McAvoy – always a performer of supernatural charm and warmth – has never been in danger of losing our attention, or our care. It helps that Baird understands that films about excess naturally wear the viewer down, and lets our increasing exhaustion correlate with Bruce’s own. So we can relate, even when the party becomes so monumentally messed-up that characters start showing up with their heads replaced by those of farm animals.

Baird handles a late plot twist with no deft touch – it not only doesn’t work, but it’s unnecessary; the sustained intrigue of Bruce’s character arc enough to hold our attention anyway – but overall has a firm grip on potentially tricky material. Quick-shifting tone can be tough for many filmmakers, but Baird manages to go from the depths of despair to outright hilarity, sometimes in a single shot (the final shot is a beautiful example of Baird’s skill in that regard). The director also injects an urgency, and an entertainment value, that papers over the cracks. Characterisation outside of Bruce is thin, whilst a romantic subplot between Bruce and Joanne Froggatt’s widowed mother has all the electricity of a romantic subplot consisting of three short scenes. But when the film is so consistently entertaining, you let it go.

At the very least, Filth is a perfect way to cap off James McAvoy’s ‘dark period.’ No-one can deny his power here, even if they can object to the film on moral grounds (Filth is funny, yes, but suicide support groups won’t be endorsing it any time soon). After playing a ‘loose cannon’ in Welcome to the Punch, a murderous thief in Trance and now a misanthropic drugs-sponge in Filth, I almost feel like it’s time someone put a hand on James McAvoy’s shoulder and said “that’s it, son; you’ve done enough.” The infectious grin’s still there, but James McAvoy has proven in 2013 that he can go to blackened depths perhaps no-one previously knew he had. Filth features his most captivating performance this year, is so far his best film this year, and marks the point at which we can stop picturing him as just the nice guy.

Grade: B