Title: Shallow Grave
Year: 1994
Director: Danny Boyle
Country: UK
Language: English
Danny Boyle has been the mastermind behind such great works as
127 Hours and Slumdog Millionaire, however when I heard that he had made a dark
comedy, noticing that a Criterion Edition is soon to be released, I was quite
surprised and slowly became very intrigued. Could this match up to the many
dark comedies I had seen? Was Danny Boyle in his element? The film stars the fantastic Ewan McGregor, surely on paper this looks like
a delightful treat. Unfortunately, this is not so. Ewan certainly holds up his
end of the stick, but the writing is so sub-par that the films becomes an
un-interesting wreck. I guess when one
attempts to climb the ladder of success they encounter some falls every now and
again. Shallow Grave was quite a fall
indeed.
Set in Glasgow, Scotland, the film starts with three roommates
who are interviewing a fourth person to join in splitting the rent. They take
great joy in humiliating all the interviewees until they stumble upon a man
named Hugo, who seems interesting enough to join their crew of misfits and
jerks. Hugo moves in, then dies of an
overdose the next morning. His roommates are quite annoyed until they find a
suitcase full of cash in his room. Like most people in dark comedy situations,
they decide that it would be best to dispose the body and keep the briefcase
full of cash, because nobody else knows that the man is dead or that he has all
this money . This “disposal” involves doing things that most people wouldn’t
dare dream of doing, such as cutting off various body parts so the corpse can’t
be identified. Once this is done, the three get unimaginably paranoid. Visitors
come in to check in on the house, but alas all are murdered, they become
victims of the three inhuman people.
Danny Boyle tries hard to make this film as funny as it can
be, but it’s just not. The attempts at humour come off as extremely weird and
uncomfortable. Don’t mistake this as a dislike for dark comedy, I love dark
comedy. The wood chipper scene in 1996’s Fargo
“Is that you partner there...in the wood chipper” was hilarious. However one
thing Fargo and many other dark
comedies had, which is why I think Boyle’s Shallow
Grave is a definite fail for me, is that they all had relatable and
likeable characters. You could feel bad
for William H. Macy’s character when his wife’s fake kidnapping doesn’t go the
way he wants it to in Fargo, in this film I felt nothing for
any of the characters. They all were complete assholes who would berate and abuse people for fun.
Even when Ewan McGregor’s character is at his most paranoid we are
unsympathetic.
We need to be sympathetic about these characters as the
whole film is based on the tension of being caught. We need to care that they
could go to jail for a really long time if they are caught, but we don’t.
Therefore the suspension is gone, I was actually rooting that the three jerks;
Alex (Ewan Mcgregor), David (Christopher Eccleston) and Juliet (Kerry Fox) get
caught. Is this the point though? Is this film supposed to be an anti-dark
comedy? If so then he has done a great job, but I strongly doubt it. Even Edgar
Allen Poe felt his murderers needed some hint of humanity.
In conclusion, though
Danny Boyle is one of the best directors of the 21sr Century, he definetley had
a few flops in the 90’s. This is one of those flops. The attempts at humor
were, at best, incredibly uncomfortable and awkward. It likely would have
worked better if the characters portrayed more humanity. Every dark comedy
needs a sympathetic character you can root for or sympathize with. This film
did not satisfy the demands of the genre. Piss on it! 1/5
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