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This is as much a journey through one man’s mind as it is through Edinburgh’s dark underbelly of general horridness and all the bodily fluids you can think of, plus quite a few you didn’t know the body actually produced. However, as adapted and directed by Jon S. Baird, it has an energy, a verve, a glee and a relentless intensity that somehow keep you hanging on in there. It is fast, and inventive, with a discombobulating soundtrack of familiar Christmas tunes, and although there are many hallucinatory episodes — Bruce’s pivotal relationship with his wife is largely told through hallucinatory episodes, and his relationship with his shrink (Jim Broadbent), plus there are animal heads — and one doesn’t like hallucinatory episodes as a rule, just as one doesn’t like dream sequences as a rule, these are always narratively clear, and psychologically revealing. And the deal becomes this: Bruce thinks he’s a winner, at the top of his game, while we, the audience, know he is a loser and mentally unravelling. Think of Holden Caulfield, turned nasty and taken as low as a human can go, if not lower.
So, something of an endurance. There is even one of those scenes set in a warehouse-type room where something vile happens to someone tied to a straight-backed chair, and as soon as you see the room and the chair you know it’s going to be awful. (And it is awful, from what I could gather from behind my hands.) But. But, but, but. There are some wonderful moments, including a trip to Amsterdam where Eddie Marsan, playing an otherwise timid accountant, lets it all hang loose, and Joanne Froggatt (Anna in Downton; a nice series for nice people) even turns up as Bruce’s one chance at redemption. Mostly, though, there is McAvoy, who is one of those actors who can, by some process — I don’t know what the technical name for this is, but it could be ‘brilliant acting’ — bring depth to emptiness, and although Bruce is never likeable, or even sympathetic, McAvoy offers us sufficient glimpses of the guilt and shame and self-loathing that drive him and, oddly, we begin to care what happens to him.
I was strangely hooked, and now I’ve seen it, I will always know I’ve seen it, just as I’ll always know I’ve seen The Night Porter, for example, or Clockwork Orange or even that other Irvine Welsh-based film, Trainspotting. Filth is ghastly and unpleasant, but also kind of brilliant, and therein lies both the reward and the rub. Plus, I do think we all need to accept life can’t be all about bland talent competitions, although, for the record, I would like to say it’s not true that we watch The X Factor and record Strictly every Saturday night. Sometimes, we do it the other way round.
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