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The film opens with Lord Donald Brocklebank (Roger Lloyd-Pack,) a worn-down, silent shell of an old man, pushing an empty wheelchair through a quiet room. The image delivers the same feeling as a dark grey painting, lonely and despondent.
He watches, lip quivering, as an ambulance pulls into his massive estate. Cut back an undetermined amount of time. Donald stands straighter.He maintains a kind of pride that must come with being one of the British elite, but he is grieving. He has a lot to grieve about.
His wife Lady Nancy Brocklebank is terribly sick, and probably won't be with him much longer. The bills are piling up, and they will soon lose their mansion. His son James (Leo Bill, in an over-the-top performance that works,) dashes around the house with little clear purpose.
James is in his mid-to-late twenties. He is stuck in a kind of permanent childhood, the kind of childhood that is made up of nightmares, not whimsy. Although Simon Rumley, the director, describes him as 'mentally challenged,' I suspect Paranoid Schizophrenia.
James is by far my favorite character in the film. He is a complicated movie creation, and his emotional limitations do not hold back his complexity or ambiguity as a person.
Donald treats James with the casual cruelty that is most likely inflicted on the mentally ill more often than we think, condescending to him, forbidding him to use the phone or answer the door.
James is desperate to prove to his father that he is an independent adult, and plans to do so by taking care of his mother. His father understandable rejects the idea.
In an undetermined matter of days, James will have locked the door, shut out the nurse, skipped his pills, and may have destroyed the lives of those closest to him. Soon, as his lucidity deteriorates, the viewer begins to wonder if the past events were only in James' head.
This is a film for a patient audience- it's a while before anything happens, and the reality of the events is questionable.The atmosphere is palpable, and the characters are well developed.
There are many plot holes and unanswered questions throughout the film, as the story itself seems on the edge of reality, with it's Gothic features and abstract images.
People have had different opinions on whether James is 'good' or 'bad.' He is a disturbing character, to be sure. He is not a sex maniac, mad slasher, or stony-faced killer, but a exceptionally childlike and deeply disturbed man.
This movie might make you feel differently about a crime in the paper factored by mental illness. Despite naysayers, "The Living and the Dead" is a emotional bombshell and thought-provoking film.
7/10
