Fish Tank

I'm gonna be in the minority here, and part of me was close to giving this a 6/10, but as I sat down and started writing this review, I realized I couldn't do it. FISH TANK has a decent amount of virtues, but it's undone by too many problems that overshadow them, as much as I hate giving the "thumbs down" to a movie that is obviously so well-intentioned and committed to portraying a home life with so much grit and authenticity.

The first 45 minutes or so of FISH TANK are fantastic, absolutely worthy of the recognition received by the overall film at Cannes. We can tell immediately that Mia (Katie Jarvis) is a totally unruly teenager, but not in the sense that she's evil or anything. She's just very troubled, which we get to understand even better when she gets home and we see the disdain she receives from her younger sister and her mother (who looks like she must've been extremely young when she gave birth to Mia). One morning, while at her kitchen, Mia meets her mother's new boyfriend, Connor (Michael Fassbender), who is incredibly hot. He walks in casually with no shirt and his pants not quite as adjusted as they should be, thus already cluing us into the fact that there'll be sexual tension between these two later (though it comes a lot later in the film than you may expect).

The initial scenes during which we get to see Mia's struggle to cope with her mother's poor treatment of her in contrast to Connor's perhaps TOO good treatment of her are great. Unfortunately, there comes a point in which the movie seems to run out of things to say. I read that director Andrea Arnold actually won an Oscar a few years ago for directing a short film, and one suspects that FISH TANK may have been more effective as that rather than as a full-length feature film. There's an instance during the last act during which a "kidnapping" of sorts takes place, and while the sequence is well-directed and performed it's difficult to understand how this fits with the motivations of our protagonist... and it'll be even harder to understand the consequence of this event, an awkwardly-staged scene that takes place in the dark and features one character slapping another in the face. This gives one the impression that the film wasn't sure which direction to go in, and decided to go for subtlety so that viewers could make up their own interpretations, but the approach doesn't work here because we don't really have all the pieces to connect the dots.

In addition, there are two important points that the plot hinges on that are made (unfortunately) way too obvious during the early scenes. When Connor says that his tattoo is of an ex-girlfriend, and when he later says that he was talking to his mother on the phone, we know exactly what the truth is (and it's too early for the film to give us that information). Similarly, when Mia picks up an ad for "Female Dancers," we know exactly what she's getting into, oblivious as she may be, but when Mia discovers it, the movie seems to treat it as though it should also be a revelatory surprise for the audience, which it certainly isn't.

The ending of FISH TANK takes the easiest possible way out. In a matter of two minutes, it tries to award redemption to two characters, when there was little development that came before it to make us believe that this resolution was possible. To be honest, a large part of me believes the little sister's redemption. Yes, she essentially insulted Mia during the entire movie, but it's easier to attribute that to immaturity and to believe that she realized how much she loved her older sister at this point in the movie. However, the mother's redemption (considering everything we saw before the last act) needed far more than a sudden smile while dancing. I appreciate subtlety in dramas, but not when it's used to cut corners and to avoid fleshing the plot out as effectively as it should be. Credit goes to Jarvis for her strong performance, but she deserved a better film (or like I said, perhaps a shorter one).

5/10