Posted on 06/22/2003 3:24:47 PM PDT by governsleastgovernsbest
SWEET SIXTEEN / ***1/2 (R)
June 13, 2003
BY ROGER EBERT
"Sweet Sixteen" is set in Scotland and acted in a local accent so tricky it needs to be subtitled. Yet it could take place in any American city, in this time of heartless cuts in social services and the abandonment of the poor. I saw the movie at about the same time our lawmakers eliminated the pitiful $400 per child tax credit, while transferring billions from the working class to the richest 1 percent. Such shameless greed makes me angry, and a movie like "Sweet Sixteen" provides a social context for my feelings, showing a decent kid with no job prospects and no opportunities, in a world where only crime offers a paying occupation.
Yes, you say, but this movie is set in Scotland, not America. True, and the only lesson I can learn from that is that in both countries too many young people correctly understand that society has essentially written them off.
The director of "Sweet Sixteen," Ken Loach, is political to the soles of his shoes, and his films are often about the difficulties of finding dignity as a working person. His "Bread and Roses" (2000) starred the future Oscar winner Adrien Brody as a union activist in Los Angeles, working to organize a group of non-union office cleaners and service employees. In "Sweet Sixteen," there are no jobs, thus no wages.
The movie's hero is a 15-year-old named Liam (Martin Compston) who has already been enlisted into crime by his grandfather and his mother's boyfriend. We see the three men during a visit to his mother in prison, where Liam is to smuggle drugs to her with a kiss. He refuses: "You took the rap once for that bastard." But the mother is the emotional and physical captive of her boyfriend, and goes along with his rules and brutality.
The boy is beaten by the two older men, as punishment, and his precious telescope is smashed. He runs away, finds refuge with his 17-year-old sister Chantelle (Annmarie Fulton), and begins to dream of supporting his mother when she is released from prison. He finds a house trailer on sale for 6,000 pounds, and begins raising money to buy it.
Liam and his best friend, Pinball (William Ruane), have up until now raised money by selling stolen cigarettes, but now he moves up a step, stealing a drug stash from the grandfather and the boyfriend and selling it himself. Eventually he comes to the attention of a local crimelord, who offers him employment--but with conditions, he finds out too late, that are merciless.
Some will recall Loach's great film "Kes" (1969), about a poor English boy who finds joy in training a pet kestrel--a season of self-realization, before a lifetime as a miner down in the pits. "Sweet Sixteen" has a similar character; Liam is sweet, means well, does the best he can given the values he has been raised with. He never quite understands how completely he is a captive of a system that has no role for him.
Yes, he could break out somehow--but we can see that so much more easily than he can. His ambition is more narrow. He dreams of establishing a home where he can live with his mother, his sister and his sister's child. But the boyfriend can't permit that; it would underline his own powerlessness. And the mother can't make the break with the man she has learned to be submissive to.
The movie's performances have a simplicity and accuracy that is always convincing. Compston, who plays Liam, is a local 17-year-old discovered in auditions at his school. He has never acted before, but is effortlessly natural. Michelle Coulter, who plays his mother, is a drug rehab counselor who also has never acted before, and Annmarie Fulton, who plays the sister Chantelle, has studied acting but never appeared in a film.
By using these inexperienced actors (as he often does in his films), Loach gets a spontaneous freshness; scenes feel new because the actors have never done anything like them, and there are no barriers of style and technique between us and the characters. At the end of "Sweet Sixteen," we see no hope in the story, but there is hope in the film itself, because to look at the conditions of Liam's life is to ask why, in a rich country, his choices must be so limited. The first crime in his criminal career was the one committed against him by his society. He just followed the example.
Note: The flywheels at the MPAA still follow their unvarying policy of awarding the PG-13 to vulgarity and empty-headed violence ("2 Fast 2 Furious"), while punishing with the R any film like this, which might actually have a useful message for younger viewers.
As we see so often, liberals view all our income as the property of the government. So when a tax cut lets people hold on to more of their earnings, liberals like Ebert see this as "transferring" the money from the poor to the rich.
The plight of the charachter in this movie was not caused by capitolism, they were caused by socialism.
I wish liberals like Ebert could pull their heads out of their asses and see that.
Liberals like Ebert are so seeped in socialist dogma they can never come clean of it. They would have to admit they were completley wrong about everything, including all their vicious attacks on conservatives.
Do the "poor" in America even pay billions of dollars in taxes? Hard to transfer the money from a group that doesn't even pay. It's just a system of giving back monies according to who gave it in the first place.
Why don't we figure out what percent of the "the rich" that Bill Gates makes up and just refer to him as Bill Gates. We can talk of the top 5% of income earners, 1%, etc. but he'll skew the numbers. I wonder if we considered his county in Washington, how much of the state's wealth we could say was there.
I live within 2 traffic lights of Ken Lay but I have nowhere near as much money.
Isn't this the same man who gave a negative review to a movie because it had the "wrong" position on the death penalty? The man was claiming his innocence but the audience learned that he really was guilty.
No one else has said it, so I feel it my duty to, even with the threat of banishment...:
Roger, you're an asshole.
FMCDH
Roger's career died the day Sikel passed on.
Roger could always go back to screenwriting but X rated films just don't have much need for a script these days (his screenwriting credits were for Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls, Up, and Beneath the Valley of The Ultravixens). Russ Meyer has health problems and been centered on working on his own autobiographical projects.
Roger's gone off the deep end on politics since the early 1990s.
That would have to be a deep kiss. Sounds incestuous.
I wonder how it would have fit into Mr. Ebert's socio-political worldview if this character had opted to sell himself into the world of male teenage prostitution (to older paying men).
I suppose that this character never had the ability to study when he was in school. Too depressed? His mates considered it selling out to be a braniac? Really, what put him in this condition?
Parents raised their kids without an income? Parents were criminals so he's just following in the family business?
The real lesson is that in America you can be what you want to be. You are not tied to the profession of your family. The public school that you can enter into isn't determined by some sort of test or social connections.
Teens in the suberbs (who have 2 parents with plenty of income) still feel angst. Not all "woe is me" and "life is so unfair" has a grounding in reality.
Even those on the lower end of the economic scale change change their lot. Those who feel abandoned build the prison/hell by which they find themselves trapped.
Mr. Ebert still gave 2 Fast 2 Furious a Thumbs Up! rating. What a doofus.
Very true.
The days of a basic movie review are long gone for Ebert. The same can be said for movies too. I want movies to entertain me, not inform me about the sexual excapades of some teenage snotrag or the adventures of a middle aged pervert.
That's why I will always enjoy movies from the Golden Age of Hollywood, 1930`s-1950`s. With each decade from the 1960`s onward, I find less and less movies made to entertain the viewer. Message movies and movies made with utter boring details, have little chance of finding their way onto my TV/DVD/VCR.
By using inexperienced actors and fresh faces, he gets his talent cheap and the audience does not view the film with preconceived notions as to what type of person the characters are (based on who is in the role).
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