Directrospective: SHALLOW GRAVE (1994)
Notes on the films of English director and central Smurfs antagonist Danny Boyle.
Christopher Eccleston as an Edinburgh accountant driven to madness and murder by a suitcase full of money.
What if three hot young roommates found a bunch of ill-begotten money and decided to keep it? The stresses and temptations of that sort of a situation would probably put their relationships with one another to the test, huh? They might get into a fair amount of trouble from such a decision, both with law enforcement and with anyone who had been involved in the money’s ill-begetting, one could imagine. And what if – bear with me here – what if all these hot young roommates were complete fucking assholes to their very cores?
Why do these people find a life-changing amount of money? Ewan McGregor, Kerry Fox, and Christopher Eccleston are Edinburgh yuppies with universally desirable jobs (accountant, doctor, newspaper journalist when that was a desirable job) and a huge, gorgeous flat. Their jobs have made them so financially secure that they can afford to leave one huge, gorgeous bedroom vacant until inflicting psychic torture on desperate applicants no longer amuses them. When they do settle on a fourth roommate, he’s pretty obviously a sociopathic creep – no doubt a large part of his appeal for them. Immediately upon moving in, he overdoses. They discover him, very dead and very nude – this will be the first of several onscreen dongs in Boyle’s oeuvre - and before they think to call the cops they’ve already started rooting through his stuff.
As Paul Brunick put it pretty conclusively in his review of 127 HOURS for Film Comment, Boyle is “a director of modern-day fables and fairy tales [who] disguises (just barely) his conventionally sentimental and spiritually romantic vision by way of surface-action brutality and verité affect.” The man makes zippy, visually frenetic movies about people deciding whether or not they should be selfish and almost always deciding they shouldn’t.
Boyle’s first film is his most (intentionally) challenging. In SHALLOW GRAVE, the simplistic morality at the heart of most of his work is a bit murkier; rather than subjecting an ultimately decent person to difficult circumstances and bringing them out the other side having resisted temptation, as Boyle so often does, this film subjects a couple real pieces of work to a problem entirely of their own making and finds them changed to varying degrees. McGregor’s journalist Alex is clearly the hardest and meanest of the bunch at the start. He’s the most staunchly in favor of keeping the money and the one who suggests they could dispose of the body by hacking it up. Eccleston’s accountant David is apprehensive at the outset, but only out of self-preservation, and doesn’t think he could stomach any dismemberment. Kerry Fox as the doctor, Juliet, is cold and calculating, playing the men’s affections toward her to her advantage.
But by the time the suspicions and bodies have piled up, everyone is in a different place: David has become a blood-numbed paranoiac capable of anything, Juliet is a frayed bundle of nerves, and Alex has somehow grown a conscience. Boyle’s film is a biting condemnation of yuppies as ruthlessly self-interested ghouls that also asks us to pay attention to, try to empathize with, and decide whether to root for these schmucks. By the end we feel as rotten as that dead man’s hacked up corpse.
Oddly, Boyle’s feature debut might also be his most visually sophisticated. The manic, rave-inflected visual style for which he would become known is smartly doled out only when necessary. Boyle and cinematographer Brian Tufano (with whom he would shoot his next two films as well) make brilliant use of an incredible flat set constructed on a sound stage, built on risers to allow the camera to sit underneath the floor as well as up in the attic where a paranoid David retreats to stay close to the money. They take a small story and tell it well, with restraint and judicious flash.