A couple nights ago, I've had this terrible dream where my father died and my mother kept calling and Skyping me at home, unable to cope with the loneliness. She was falling apart and there was nothing I could do to help. While I was dreaming, Josie was struggling with a nightmare of her own and put my hand on her belly to calm herself. The next morning, I was so confused that I wasn't sure if my dad had passed or if whether or not I had dreamed all the events of the previous night. All my senses were jumbled up. I had a Freudian moment.
The struggle with subconscious reality is difficult to illustrate and FILTH, the 2013 adaptation of Irvine Welsh's iconic novel struggles with that. It's obviously well-written and James McAvoy's an unlikely antihero, but everything else about this film ranges from unoriginal to straight out messy.
Bruce Robertson (James McAvoy) is an ambitious, predatory cop competing with a handful of colleagues for an important promotion. When a murder investigation lands on his desk, Bruce unleashes his most ruthless ways in order to display his efficiency, but the intensity he shows at work has a backlash on his personal life as his alcohol and cocaine intake increase dramatically and he starts losing grip on reality. Bruce's intense personality and drug abuse has transformed his personal life into an abstract nightmare over the last couple years and the stress of this investigation (plus the important promotion attached to its results) might topple ol' Bruce for good.
It's difficult to be Freudian in a movie. It's even more difficult when your protagonist is slowly dissociating from reality. I think Darren Aronofsky's BLACK SWAN had the most seamless, disturbing integration of hints of a crumbling subconcious (the breaking nails, the feathers poking under the skin). In FILTH, everything is so clear that it becomes predictable. I mean, the story isn't but the treatment of Bruce's psyche makes it as clear as day that he's going to lose his mind. There is this reccuring ''Freudian scene'' where Bruce is stranded in an unknown place, where this unknown professor just keep throwing symbols at him. There's nothing to take away from these scenes except that Bruce is fucking losing it. That looming insanity is a mere personality trait,it doesn't really threaten anything.
Hey look, it's Professor Jerkov, a distant relative of Captain Obvious.
In all fairness, there are also quick flashes in the real world, where Bruce sees people as deformed animals (including himself as a pig, when he looks into the mirror). It's somewhat of a cliché movie device that is supposed to create a fleeting sense of horror in the viewer, I guess it helps bridging the gap between these ridiculous nightmare scenes and Bruce's reality. The selling point of the storytline IS that Bruce is going insane and every scene about Bruce's looming insanity is way too obvious, cliché or unmemorable. FILTH is not deconstructing Bruce's reality, but creates an alternate one (until it's just about over). It's too bad because because if the movie focused on Bruce being an asshole (I didn't read the novel, but I think it could've been possible knowing Irvine Welsh's style), I think that the stellar play of James McAvoy could've made FILTH actually memorable.
I'm a big advocate of reverse thinking when it comes to casting. James McAvoy has been typecasted in the neutered boyfriend/virtuous hero parts all of his career, so I think no one but him could've translated the subtleties Bruce's inner struggles so well on the silver screen. He delivers a strong performance despite being caught in a mediocre movie and kind of keeps the whole enchilada from capsizing into cinema oblivion. Because FILTH is kind of stylish if you remove any notion of meaning from the equation. Otherwise, it's just telling a story you've already been told before in a somewhat colourful way. It's not a rotten movie, but there's nothing exciting to it outside of James McAvoy's spirited and layered performance.