Young Adam

Rating:
Summary: Young Adam movie review
Review: A brooding, oportunistic former writer searches endlessly for intamacy with women he doesn't want. Running away from himself, (and the haunting memory of an ex-girlfriend), he finds himself amidst the lower working class; shoveling coal on a barge owned by a small family. Oneday he and his shipmate find the body of a young woman floating in the harbor and it triggers a string of memories from his past. He seems to leave a subtle trail of distruction and broken hearts in his wake; obscured further by disfuntion that already existed.

Rating:
Summary: Steamy premise, but there's not much more...
Review: It's the kind of opening you want in an eerie, NC-17-rated mystery-thriller: a scantily clad dead female body washing up to the surface of of bleak Scottish strait, barge workers fishing it out. In fact, Young Adam, the latest proof that McGregor is outstanding in anything he does, hits all the right notes so early that its descent into narrative nothingness soon after is enough to piss you off. You see, McGregor's Jim dated the dead woman earlier (no one knows that but him, of course) and he also has an eye on the owner of the barge, played by Tilda Swinton. Problem: Swinton's character is married, but who's that stopping since the movie is NC-17? So begins a steady torrent of naughty little sex scenes that seem to be the point of the movie after a while.

And even though the movie flashes back to Jim's past, filling in the missing pieces of the girl's death, and despite gorgeously bleak cinematography, there's pretty much nothing in Young Adam besides the touted trysts. Characters move in and out of the movie, there's little rise and fall to it all, and after 6 or 7 sexual encounters I wanted my cigarette already and hoped the movie would go on to bigger and better things. For such a great cast, this kind of vapid, pithy material is borderline insulting - Swinton's conflicted wife could have been given more depth, the cuckold husband implausibly picks up and leaves when he discovers the affair, and not until the end of the movie does McGregor's Jim make the journey slightly worthwhile. And that brings me to the end - for all my griping and quips about Adam, the film's cunning insistence on emotional distance from Jim (no narration, thank God!) and an inspired twist of depravity bump a film up a notch or two that just sat stagnant for so long. But it's too long. Young Adam has enough of a steamy premise to keep you marginally interested for a while, but as sleazy tales of infidelity and foul play go, I've had better. GRADE: C+

Rating:
Summary: Young Adam proves to be an interesting film!
Review: Young Adam is based on the novel by Alexander Trocchi, and stars Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton. Ewan plays a young man who has gone from university and a life of privilige to being a worker on a river barge that delivers coal. He works for a married couple who along with their son make up the crew. At the start they find the body of a girl in the river.

Ewan's character has a past with the corpse, and through flashbacks scattered throughout the film we see what has happened to make him what he is now - a lothario and someone who seems to be numb. I thought from descriptions that the movie might be a sexually charged mystery, but it plays more like a mournful descent into loneliness.

Much has been made of the NC-17 rating. Honestly Ewan has shown more of himself in VELVET GOLDMINE and THE PILLOW BOOK. He has a few scenes with Tilda Swinton that are sort of graphic, and the flashbacks are pretty out there ... but both Ewan and Tilda look like barge workers, and the sex is mechanical for the most part. So don't expect something sexy as in BASIC INSTINCT or 9 1/2 WEEKS! There are definitely R-rated movies out there that show much more, and do it much less subtly. Some of the scenes are even fully clothed in YOUNG ADAM! I think the main problem with kids would be them sitting through two hours of a movie that does not rely on dialogue very heavily. Entire scenes are done with looks.

Much has been made about Ewan's character being a sociopath. Surely he is unlikeable, and seems to not do right things ... but it feels more like inertia and grief than a real desire to do harm to others. He even saves a life at one point! Hardly the work of someone basically bad.

A good movie if you are feeling introspective and want well photographed art film with good acting. But surely not action packed or even sexually charged as the rating or other reviews may lead you to believe. This is a quiet film of desperation.