Movie: What Richard Did (Lenny Abrahamson, 2012)
Lenny Abrahamson did not lose his cool! I was afraid he would go for a comforting ending, turning Richard (Jack Reynor) over to the police. Based on the film's title, I was also afraid he would go for one of those needlessly elliptical plots intertwining scenes of Richard before the incident and Richard after the incident, leaving the audience in the dark for as long as possible about what Richard did. But he tells the story fully chronologically and the film is better for it. The straightforward narrative highlights how unremarkable the events leading up to Richard's misdeed are, and how easily teens can ruin a life. Especially when they are white, affluent and popular and have never needed to face the consequences of their dumb actions. When Richard throws a couple of punches to his rugby teammate Connor at a house party, it is quite clear that this is not the first (or second, or third..) time he has thrown a punch.
One of the more underrated films of the past few years has been Lone Scherfig's The Riot Club, about rich Oxford students who can't be held accountable for their actions, because they can always pull the right strings. It's an sharply written and performed film, unafraid to sting in every scene. It's also driven by a righteous anger that few recent films have matched. It came out two years after What Richard Did, and is the better film. Abrahamson's direction is a bit too understated and too resigned to give the film the extra bit of acerbity it needs. But What Richard Did puts the audience a bit more on the hook than The Riot Club did.
The Riot Club explicitly identifies the students at its center as (the offspring of) rich Tories and presents them as arrogant entitled assholes who are not liked by the majority of the British society. Yet because of their elite connections they can do whatever they want and be ensured that once graduated they will have the kind of careers that will give them power over the populace. They are untouchable people who can shape the rules of society in their favor. Richard is not an entitled asshole. He is in fact quite a sympathetic character, smart, sensitive and good at rugby. He makes outsiders feel included among his group of friends, is responsible and able to help a girl who has had an unpleasant sexual encounter in a bar, and genuinely loves his girlfriend Lara (Roisin Murphy). He has courted Lara straight out of the hands of Connor, but that's something 18 year olds tend to do. Besides, Lara is clearly happier (Murphy is a really great actress with an ability to portray small shifts in her emotional state without doing much) with Richard, who is more mature than Connor and can have meaningful conversations about life with her. Richard's parents own a house in Dublin and a small vacation home on the coast, but while they are well off, they are not filthy rich or part of the elite. Richard and his family do not have the power to bend society to their will, but the film is partly about the fact that they don't need to. Richard is the kind of "promising young man" society is built for. There are unseen forces at play which just make sure that the rules bend over in favor of people like Richard, without anyone really needing to make some explicit intervention.
In the end I was reminded of the Rabbi Nachtner's story in A Serious Man (to be fair, I am often reminded of that, as it is one of the greatest scenes ever), about the Jewish dentist who had a moral and spiritual crisis after thinking he found a message from God in one of his patient's teeth. The Rabbi explains that these questions are like a tootache. "We feel them for awhile, then they go away." And so after obsessively checking the mouths of his other patients for a while, the dentist eventually simply stopped checking. He "returned to life", playing golf and having happy dinners with his wife. After killing Connor, Richard has a crisis of conscience. Lara leaves him, he can't eat, he loses touch with his two best friends. But he doesn't turn himself over to the police, potential witnesses remain silent, and eventually Lara comes back to him, he has drunken conversations in the park with his friends, and starts following classes at university. He returns to life.
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