"I Like You. I'll Kill You Last."

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If you live in NYC or LA, Andrea Arnold's marvelous new film Fish Tank is now officially open, today. And you need to go and see it. Not just because Michael Fassbender is sex (although that's a big red plus in the plus column), but also because it is an insanely well-crafted and intelligent and deeply perceptive film that treads familiar ground with the nimble foot-work of a film-maker entirely capable and energized to tell us something about something old in an entirely special and new way. That's why, dammit!

I've been scoping out some of the reviews today and here are a couple choice bits. Slight spoilers ahead, so tread lightly. Via Cinematical comes one of the most important aspects of why the film succeed so remarkably for me:

"Most remarkably, however, the film manages never to venture into territory that feels too safe, comfortable or conventional, which is not to say that it fails to offer the characters a reprieve from their rough lives, but it never makes any of their options to clean or easily come by. Despite her dreams of being a hip-hop dancer, she's just not that talented, and her one opportunity to follow that fantasy manifests itself in a way that feels depressingly realistic instead of inspirationally implausible."

I kept fearing a misstep that would never come. The fact that Mia is only an okay dancer, the fact that the big audition she's been looking forward to the whole movie is really just a bunch of strippers with no rhythm in what looks like a dimly lit buffet hall in a casino... well that could've come off as horribly depressing in lesser hands, but it didn't here. It just felt right, and natural, and you got the feeling that Mia got it, and took the right lesson from it. Small lessons, but the most important sort.

And via AO Scott in the NYT:

"A trained actor might have taken care to sort out and communicate Mia’s emotions, giving the audience a clear perspective on the girl’s inner life. Instead, Ms. Jarvis’s tentative, sometimes opaque self-presentation registers the crucial fact about Mia, which is her confusion. She is a puzzle to herself, unable to understand, much less control, her fury, her desire or her fear. When she dances alone in an empty apartment, she is not exactly at peace, but at least in a state of cease-fire in her ongoing war with herself and everything else."

Well said, Tony! I also love the fact that he later makes a point to single out the actress Kierston Wareing that plays Mia's perpetually drunk or disinterested mother, because I thought she was completely fantastic and I hadn't heard much about her performance so far.

Oh, and then lots of this, the end.

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