Ratcatcher

I'm not sure who said it, but there's a maxim that goes, "If you can understand what's going on with a movie with the sound off, then it works." Of course that can't be said of every movie--it certainly wouldn't work with My Dinner With Andre--but it works with Ratcatcher, Lynne Ramsays' bleak but beautiful film from 1999.

Set in Glasgow during a garbage strike, there's little that's pretty in Ratcatcher. But there are moments of thrilling visual poetry, such as the opening scene, in which a boy wraps himself in a lace curtain. His mother scolds him and the curtain twists back into shape. Later, that boy will go out to play with another boy by a polluted canal. They will get into some playful fisticuffs and the first boy will drown.

The boy that lives is James, the focus of the story. Ramsay has started the film with a switcheroo, focusing on one boy and then shifting to another, which makes the audience a little precarious from then on. But the film does settle on James and his family. He has two sisters, one older and already using makeup, and one younger, who is a sweet little thing who loves Tom Jones (I'm not sure when the film is set--Wikipedia says the '70s). His parents are haggard; his dad is a hard drinker, his mother kind of just gets through the day. They are waiting for housing that will take them out of the slum and into a new development, where the land borders a field that stretches to the horizon.

James doesn't talk much. He hangs with a quartet of older boys, who are up to no good. They tease and have their way with the local easy girl (Leanne Mullen). She and James strike up a sweet, innocent romance. There's an astonishingly good scene in which the two--he's about 12, she's perhaps 15--take a bath together, but there's nothing sexual about it. Later James will run away from home and go to her flat, and he will climb into bed with her, fully clothed.

Ramsay's script is brilliant in how it manages certain themes. One of them is, as the title suggests, rodents. The garbage piles up around the neighborhood, where the kids sit on the bags as if they bean-bag chairs. This brings in rats, and the boys make a game of trying to kill them, and then carry them around by the tail as if they were trophies. But a little white mouse counters the image of the rats. He's Snowball, and he belongs to Kenny, James' neighbor, who's a bit off and has a thing for animals. James tells him that Snowball can fly to the moon, so Kenny ties his pet to a helium-filled balloon and lets him go, calling after him, "Goodbye, Snowball." We then get a fantasy sequence of Snowball making it to the moon, which is crawling with white mice. It doesn't seem like this sort of scene would work in a realistic social drama, but it does.

The other major theme is the dirty canal, which takes a life in the first act and will try to take more as the film goes on. As the Mississippi was representative of life in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, this toxic canal is a symbol of death in Ratcatcher. People speak of it as if it were the bogeyman, but the children play next to it, just the same.

Ratcatcher uses mostly amateur actors, especially in the kids' roles. William Eadie is kind of amazing as James, and has a quality that only a nonprofessional can bring. You can tell this kid wasn't brought up in tap dancing school. He's mostly still throughout the film, but there's a kind of world-weariness/serenity combo in his face that catches your breath.

Ramsay has only made three features (this was her first). I've seen Morvern Callar, which was okay, and haven't yet seen We Have to Talk About Kevin, but Ratcatcher is an outstanding work.