The War Zone

This movie was hailed by critics and a favorite at the major film festivals, but to me it was icky and made me want to walk out in front of a speeding bus. And I can do bleak. And I'm interested in the issue of incest! But ... ick.

Sixteen-year-old Tom discovers that his eighteen-year-old sister Jessie has been having sex with their father, then struggles with what to do with that knowledge.

The first shots of Tom, where he's seen riding his bike on a winding path to his family's new home near the seaside in Devon (where they have recently moved from London) are fun to watch. Enjoy them, because everything in the rest of the movie is disturbing and miserable.

Every shot inside the house is claustrophobic. It is always dark. It is always cluttered. The wallpaper in Tom's room is enough to make you go completely Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Not long after the movie starts, Tom and Jessie's pregnant mother goes into labor. While the family speeds to the hospital with Mum screaming in pain and Dad yelling at the teenage kids, the car goes off the road and rolls over (everyone, including the baby, comes out fine)--an odd event that is supposed to be symbolic of the family's coming destruction, but all you truly needed for foreshadowing was that wallpaper. Meanwhile, every shot of the coast is bleak and threatening.

On top of all that, for the first third of the movie, Tom, the character we are supposed to identify with, is the person in the family that I liked least. For the second third, pretty much everyone, save Mum and baby Alice, was unlikeable. Interestingly (before it becomes clear what he is doing to Jessie) the father is an unsettling mix of asshole and likeable and respectable man. In the end, I finally came around to liking young Tom, once he finally (sort of) told his mother something was going on. At this point, Jessie also became a sympathetic character.

One of the things that turned me off most is the continual inappropriate nudity and sexual undercurrents in this family. Mum sits at a table with her breast hanging out of her zip-up breastfeeding bra looking right at Tom, who is staring at her. Dad gets out of bed in the middle of the night to answer the phone completely nude, walking past Tom. Tom stops and stares in at his bra & underwear-clad mother through the open bedroom door, and she thinks nothing of it. Jessie bursts into the bathroom while Tom is on the toilet and yanks a magazine out of his hand. Jessie is topless or nude half the times Tom talks (or wrestles/fights) with her, and neither of them seems to think this is strange. Apparently there is a point to this in the novel on which the film is based. But in the film it just feels pointlessly gross. Perhaps this is because the nudity is not implied; it is laid out plain for the camera. Meanwhile, Jessie seems obsessed with sex (a symptom of abuse, I know, but it feels odd here, for reasons I'll cover in the next paragraph), and the second time that Tom observes a sexual act between Jessie and their father, he watches the entire thing (as do we: the whole thing is presented in all its disturbingness, with the victim's body plain for us to see). Tom and Jessie's relationship increasingly takes on a sexual charge. The whole family has a disturbing sexual cloud hanging over it, and, unfortunately, no one--no one--goes untouched, as becomes clear when the baby winds up in the hospital.

The things about the film that are most problematic to me have to do with Jessie's abuse. It seems to me that War Zone novelist and screenwriter Alexander Stuart and director Tim Roth didn't know, or didn't agree on, exactly what direction they wanted to go. I have not read the novel, but according to synopses and reviews I've read, Jessie instigates the sexual relationship with her father. She also ends up having sex with Tom in the novel. When I watched the film, I indeed got the impression early on that Jessie had started the relationship with their father and that she wanted Tom to simply leave them alone. But during the sex abuse scene between Jessie and their father, things become confusing. Her body language is that of a passive participant; a victim. But if I'm hearing her correctly, she asks why he won't have sex with her like he does with her mother: vaginally. She sounds like she wants to have vaginal sex with him. He takes her anally, painfully. She cries. She looks horrified by the situation; this is a scene of sexual abuse. But I'm oddly left with this question: would she feel abused if he'd had sex with her the way she wanted??

Ultimately, she is a victim either way, and he is a perpetrator either way. But I'm trying to understand her motivation, and I'm trying to understand what this film is trying to tell me. The DVD has text extras that say this film was made to bring incest out into the open and help its victims; and information, guidance, and resources for victims of sexual abuse are provided. In the director's commentary (of which I watched chunks, not all), Tim Roth speaks of the film like it is a straight exposure of the horror of incest and what it does to its victims. But this isn't simply a story of a daughter terrorized by her father. Or is it? At the end of the movie, and in the presentation of the movie, apparently the makers of the movie want it to be. But that's not all that's going on with Jessie. My point is not that it wasn't sexual abuse, or that it wasn't horrible and wrong. It is that, according to the novel, Jessie was disturbed before sex with her father even started. This is implied in scattered comments in the movie, but in the end, the movie doesn't seem to want to go that way. Because of that, even apart from it just being an unenjoyable movie to watch (and not because of the subject matter), I think it fails. Why was Jessie disturbed? Why is everyone naked all the time? Why did the mother believe immediately that her husband shouldn't be trusted, when Tom gave her pretty much nothing to go by concerning why? This is not a seemingly loving family gone wrong, in my impression; this is a wacked-out family finally disintegrating.

Having said that, Tilda Swinton and Ray Winstone are excellent as the parents. Lara Belmont does an amazing job as Jessie, especially considering this was her first acting job. The casting is excellent from a physical perspective also: Jessie looks like a perfect younger version of her mother, which, of course, adds to the creepiness of the crime at hand. Freddie Cunliffe as Tom ... this was his first acting job, too. Considering that, he is impressive. But overall I found him annoying and, to tell the truth, creepy.

One other thing I will say for the film: the setting and composition of the brutal sex abuse scene are genius. It's in an old stone structure on the coast, with slits for "windows." Tom watches through a vertical one, looking in at the events, while two horizontal rectangles with sky behind them watch back like eyes. They watch the proceedings while Tom does; the event is on display. We are all seeing the horribleness of this man, their father, in all his disgustingness, fucking his own daughter while she cries in physical and emotional pain and psychological horror.

My main problem is that there just seems to be absolutely nothing edifying in this film. I just watched a clip on YouTube in which Roger Ebert talks about how incredibly happy this family is before the shocking secret tears them apart. Happy? Where was the happy? Where was I for the happy family?

And the ending ... "What are we gonna do now?" Tim Roth says it's meant to show there are no easy solutions to this abuse. People are left wounded, scarred, floundering in its wake. But other victims could, hopefully, seek out and get the help they needed. While it was satisfying to see their father murdered, what can possibly be next for Tom besides prison? Fantastic ...

Grade: C-