Out of the Blue is a troubling, understated account of a New Zealand massacre, where loner David Gray shot dead 13 people in an isolated hamlet, Aramoana.
Many reviews of this film emphasised the lack of attention to Gray’s motives, the way in which the film avoided the question of how his actions had come about. (“It’s much, much harder to understand or explain what Gray did. Sarkies and Tetley don’t really try…”, “Pic makes no effort to explain or analyze his actions…”, etc.) I think these reviews are wrong. Gray’s psychology and situation are given plenty of attention, albeit in a subtle and understated way. There is a line clearly drawn of a man in a spiral of decline, losing his connections with those around him, increasingly unable to cope and this inability feeding back into itself. The reviewers seem to be looking for a Freudian narrative, a primal scene where his father strangled his puppies or his mother locked him in a cupboard or he was discovered masturbating or whatever. They, and we, have no right to such a narrative. The world is not made of such things. Freud was wrong. The real story of the Aramoana massacre is the fragility of the social human.
Children of Men is a vivid political fever-dream, a nervy reaction against global tendencies towards paranoia and fascism as channelled through Tony Blair’s government. The film’s future history is ridiculously implausible (no children are born for twenty years, chopping out a significant portion of the labour pool – but immigrants are despised and feared, when they would be the only way of shoring up these shortages?) but that just didn’t matter. The film is a personal journey through a set of social nightmares, delivered with absolute conviction and a technical audacity that is simply breathtaking. The film wears its Grauniad-liberal convictions proudly (possibly those who have never lived in Europe won’t understand just how incredible it is to prominently feature selfless heroics by an unkempt gypsy) and casts unpleasant shadows on what is already in place around us.
And lest this review give the impression that the film is leaden and worthy, I should emphasise it is first and foremost a great thriller/action film, with more edge-of-your-seat sequences than anything I’ve seen out of Hollywood in years. Weaknesses: a conclusion that seemed a little undercooked; that’s about it.