"An Angel's Share"
(2012)
★★★★
Author: Peter Bradshaw
Published: May 21, 2012
Translator: Virgilius
Spoiler warning
SPOILER ALERT
Ken Lodge's latest collaboration with screenwriter Paul Levarty is a warm, funny, and kind film. It's a free-spirited social realist farce — otherworldly, sometimes as naïve as a child. It seems to me that Rocky has found a happy comedy model — I think happier than his Search for Eric — and a comedy that is free of cynicism and without irony. In many ways, it was the lightest and most successful screen work he'd had since this time. "An Angel's Share" can be seen as a companion to Rocky's Sweet Sixteen or even his early classic The Child and the Eagle. Of course, it also borrows from McKendrick's Desert Island Wine Pool: a superficially mild comedy, but more critical.
Once again, Rocky uses non-professional actors and novices: his male protagonist is newcomer Paul Brannigan, playing Robbie, a violent, young Glasgow criminal accused of assault, who gets one last chance in court because he is about to become a father, and his lawyer thinks he has reformed. Sentenced to community service instead of going to jail, Robbie repaints the community center with a bunch of lawbreaking idiots and nerds: Mo, Rhinoceros, and the stupid Albert, whose eccentric remarks make people laugh suspiciously.
Harry, the supervisor, was a kind soul, he had a connoisseur-like passion for whisky, and out of goodwill, he took them to a distillery. Amazingly, Robbie had an untrained ability to discern whisky, perhaps like Billy's ability to train kestrels in Kids and Eagles, even though Robbie didn't pay as much attention to his skills.
He was interested in whiskey that evaporated into the air: the so-called "angel's share." Considering that some whiskies sell for hundreds of thousands of pounds, his hardened criminal wants to know how to get his own share.
Rocky often staged scenes in a gentle, almost quiet way, compared to contemporary tv dramas, of course. Some people may occasionally find the structure of the story a bit loose, but for me, Rocky and Leverty are speaking in a dramatic, engaging voice. A key scene is when Robbie is called to the stage of the "Blind Tasting Club" and asked to identify a whiskey.
If Ron Howard had directed, people would have been more dissatisfied with Robbie's working-class appearance and more amazed by his rainy talents. Rocky brings us a more understated and authentic.
The dramatic climax, with a hint of cheerful unreality, had to be indulged a bit, but as always, the humanism and optimism in comedy triumphed, eliminating the brutality that Robbie was trying to foolishly transcend. Harry's role as a father is very good, and he tries his best to show his children a way to find a better self. He was puzzled by the hapless Albert who failed to recognize Edinburgh Castle. "Don't you have shortbread in your house?" he asked.
How strange it would be to compare the ending of A Share of Angels to the ending of Child and Eagle. Suffice it to say that the worldview is a little different, and maybe the times are different. The film seems to have no way out — but, while it has no illusions about the chronic youth unemployment problem of 2012, it has found some light, or perhaps it is trying to solve it in an easier way. Robbie and his friends aren't angels: but the film finds a way to give them something they can't or won't give in real life: a chance.