Nil by Mouth

France, United Kingdom

1997

128 Min

Color

1.78:1

English

Currently 3.8/5 Stars.
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PROD Gary Oldman, Luc Besson, Douglas Urbanski

CAST Ray Winstone, Kathy Burke, Charlie Creed-Miles, Laila Morse, Edna Doré, Chrissie Cotterill, Jon Morrison, Jamie Foreman

MUSIC Eric Clapton

Cannes (In Competition): Best Actress, Edinburgh (Competition): Channel 4 Director's Award, Toronto (Special Presentations), Rotterdam

Synopsis

Nil By Mouth, which was a selection of the 1997 Cannes Film Festival and even supplied a best-actress win for Kathy Burke, is not what anyone would call narrative-driven. Its chief merit is as a showcase for some remarkable acting talent – its principal characters absolutely believable in their rage, desperation, and ultimately their fondness and warmer side. Its lavish disregard for plot, however, makes this a difficult film to sit through, as it cannot be said to have a real dramatic arc and, what’s more, those behaviours which are exhibited are perfectly predictable. This latter deficiency is on display particularly in the opening half-hour, in which Oldman wants to impress on every member of the audience the ambiance of the South London district of his childhood. Focusing particularly on Raymond (Ray Winstone), who has no regular job but apparently acquires his pound sterling’s through a network of scams, Oldman opens with a family scene as the locals gather in a downscale night club to be entertained by a comedian imparting bawdy jokes to a crowd that alternately pays him an ear and tell jokes of their own to their family circles. Ray, his wife Valerie (Kathy Burke), and Valerie’s brother-in-law Billy (Charlie Creed-Miles) smoke up a storm, drink Smirnoff’s vodka, and when the men sit around without their women they discuss their experiences in strip joints with all the enthusiasm of adolescents who have just acquired their legal ID’s and sample the fare of the adult world.

We learn quite a bit about these people but little or nothing about the framework that has mired them in their futile straits. Ray is the most violent member of the group, one who looks for excuses to swing his fists. In the picture’s most appalling moments, he punches and kicks his wife, accusing her with no evidence whatever of having an affair with a neighbour. When Valerie lands in the hospital, she follows the neighbourhood code – mum’s the word – and claims to have been knocked over by a hit-and-run driver. In another episode of mayhem, Ray virtually breaks the nose of his brother-in-law, Billy, whom he accuses of robbing his cache of drugs. In one unexpected setting, Ray’s mother-in-law Janet (Laila Morse) looks without disgust on his snorting of drugs, even providing money to maintain the wastrel’s habit – anything to keep the family together, particularly since her daughter is pregnant. —Britmovie.co.uk

Director

Gary Oldman

Whether playing a punk rocker, an assassin, a war vet, or a ghoul, Gary Oldman has consistently amazed viewers with his ability to completely disappear into his roles. Though capable of portraying almost any type of character, Oldman has put his stamp on those of the twisted villain/morally ambiguous weirdo variety, earning renown for his interpretations of the darker side of human nature.

Born Leonard Gary Oldman in New Cross, South London, on March 21, 1958, Oldman was raised by his mother and two sisters after his father, an alcoholic welder, left them when Oldman was seven. Nine years later, Oldman left high school to work in a sporting goods store; in his spare time, he studied literature and later acting under the tutelage of Roger Williams. He went on to act with the Greenwich Young People’s Theatre and, after attending drama school on a scholarship, worked with the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow. Oldman next worked in London’s West End, where, in 1985, he won a Best Actor… read more

Whether playing a punk rocker, an assassin, a war vet, or a ghoul, Gary Oldman has consistently amazed viewers with his ability to completely disappear into his roles. Though capable of portraying almost any type of character, Oldman has put his stamp on those of the twisted villain/morally ambiguous weirdo variety, earning renown for his interpretations of the darker side of human nature.

Born Leonard Gary Oldman in New Cross, South London, on March 21, 1958, Oldman was raised by his mother and two sisters after his father, an alcoholic welder, left them when Oldman was seven. Nine years later, Oldman left high school to work in a sporting goods store; in his spare time, he studied literature and later acting under the tutelage of Roger Williams. He went on to act with the Greenwich Young People’s Theatre and, after attending drama school on a scholarship, worked with the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow. Oldman next worked in London’s West End, where, in 1985, he won a Best Actor and a Best Newcomer award for his performance in The Pope’s Wedding. By this time, he had made his film debut in Remembrance (1982) and had appeared in two television movies, notably Honest, Decent and True (1985).

Oldman got his first big break when he was cast as Sid Vicious in Sid and Nancy (1986), Alex Cox’s disturbing docudrama account of the punk rocker’s tragic relationship with Nancy Spungen. Oldman’s unnervingly accurate portrayal of the doomed rocker won rave reviews and effectively propelled him out of complete obscurity. The following year, he turned in a completely different but equally superb performance as famed playwright Joe Orton in Stephen Frears’ Prick Up Your Ears and earned a Best Actor nomination from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts for his work. After moving to the U.S. that same year, Oldman appeared in Nicolas Roeg’s Track 29 (1988), and in 1990, he had one of his most memorable — to say nothing of cultish — roles as Rosencrantz opposite Tim Roth as Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard’s brilliant Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

Oldman’s first American role in a major Hollywood film was that of alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991). He then gave a creepy, erotic performance in the title role of Francis Ford Coppola’s rendition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), a lavish film that proved to be the most commercially successful (next to JFK) of Oldman’s career to date. In addition to playing such eccentrics as Drexl Spivey, a white pimp with dreadlocks who tries to prove himself a black Rastafarian in True Romance (1993), Oldman went on to play more conventional characters, as evidenced by his straightforward portrayal of a crooked cop in Luc Besson’s The Professional (1994), his performance as Beethoven in Immortal Beloved (1994), and his role as Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale in the disastrous 1995 adaptation The Scarlet Letter.

In 1997, Oldman made his directorial bow with Nil by Mouth, a bleak, semi-autobiographical drama about a dysfunctional blue-collar London family that Oldman dedicated to his late father. The film proved to be a controversial hit at that year’s Cannes Festival, and the first-time director won a number of international awards and a new dose of respect for his work. He subsequently returned to acting with Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element that same year, made while he took a break from editing Nil by Mouth. He also gave an enduringly cheesy portrayal of the sinister Russian terrorist bent on wresting world domination from American president Harrison Ford in the blockbuster Air Force One (1997) and followed that up by playing yet another villain in the 1998 feature-film version of the classic TV series Lost in Space.

Oldman has made headlines for his private as well as professional life over the years, both for his well-publicized battles with alcohol and his marriages to actresses Lesley Manville and Uma Thurman. In addition to his son Alfie with Manville, Oldman has two children by his third wife, American model and photographer Donya Fiorentino (though the two are now divorced). —allmovie guide

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