Super 8 isn’t the only movie this week engaged in some heavy nostalgia. For his first feature as a director, Richard Ayoade — who has directed and starred in plenty of British television comedy, including stateside cult hits like The Mighty Boosh and The IT Crowd — adapts Submarine, a coming-of-age novel from Welsh poet and novelist Joe Dunthorne. But while Dunthorne’s novel is set in the present day, Ayoade changes the setting to 1986, and beyond that, gives it the same near-fetishistic attachment to ’60s style that gives Wes Anderson films their feel.
The reason for the choice is clear: Welsh teens wearing old-fashioned duffle coats, with affinities for typewriters, polaroids, Woody Allen and classic French cinema fit into the sense of slightly surreal, outdated whimsy Ayoade is trying to create. Call it hipster-baiting and affected all you like, and you might not be wrong, but if directors like Wes Anderson and Hal Ashby don’t make you roll your eyes at the mention of their names, then the film is going to have an undeniable appeal, even if you immediately see exactly what and how Ayoade is manipulating things. This is essentially Rushmore crossed with the dark deadpan of Harold & Maude — Craig Roberts, who plays the Holden Caulfield/Max Fischer-esque role of Oliver Tate even looks a little like a young Bud Cort. While it’s nowhere near as good as either of those films, it also mixes enough of Ayoade’s own voice, and an overriding love of cinema in general, to compensate for some of its more insistent affectations.
Oliver is a precocious and somewhat emotionally damaged 15-year-old who, while bright, probably isn’t half as clever as he thinks he is. His high opinion of his intellect and his ability to manipulate his parents (Noah Taylor and Sally Hawkins) doesn’t keep him from recognizing his difficulties with fitting in socially. After insinuating himself into a clique of bullies (in order to stop them bullying him, by identifying himself as one of them), he also manages to impress the stoic and slightly cruel girl of his dreams, one Jordana Bevan (Yasmin Paige). The dual threads of the narrative follow Oliver’s attempts to navigate his first relationship (and, in slightly less crass fashion than American Pie, to lose his virginity), while simultaneously dealing with the fact that his parents are on the verge of ending theirs.
Ayoade’s love for the movies is manifested in a similar love on the part of Oliver, who has a tendency to view his entire life as a film. Sometimes, he states that outright, and the camera will actually follow explicit instructions in his narrative voiceover. Other times, old super 8 footage is used to indicate fantasy, or times that the adult Oliver might one day look back on fondly, as through the color saturated nostalgia that super 8 movies instantly suggest. At one point, he can be seen running across a beach like another coming-of-age touchstone, Antoine Doinel, in a scene that is a direct visual quote of The 400 Blows. The scene is once again a fantasy, narrated by Oliver as a movie scene, but he never references the Truffaut film — Oliver does seem a little like the sort of kid who would steal something as obvious as this scene without giving credit, and the whole sequence works as a joke, an homage, and a statement on Oliver’s character from Ayoade.
Other times, Ayoade uses the effect more subtly. During a particularly tender moment between Oliver and Jordana, the camera begins to circle around them, and the sound of the ocean can be heard clearly — Swansea is a seaside town, but they’re nowhere near the water when this is happening. We’re not as obviously in the film of Oliver’s life as we are when he’s actively talking about it, but the romantic affectation of the moment illustrates how perhaps every moment of this movie is actually Oliver’s romanticized film version of things. That may seem like a convenient excuse for Ayoade to engage in highly-stylized quirk, and perhaps it is. If one finds it overbearingly cute or takes issue with the sometimes too-obvious metaphors around water and drowning, Ayoade can always fall back on the notion that these all come from the mind of an emotional wreck of a 15-year-old boy. But I can’t fault the film for being willfully twee when it really is an illustration of Oliver’s oddball, overly-sensitive character.
Ultimately, the ability to connect this film rests squarely on the ability to connect with Oliver, because every other character here — his depressive father, prim mother, their mulleted mystic motivational speaker neighbor, Jordana — are all versions of themselves as related by Oliver. So if you tend to already think Holden Caulfield is a whiny brat, your patience with Oliver is likely to be even shorter.
If, on the other hand, you sympathize with Oliver, who vehemently disagrees with his parents’ assertion — made in a rather ham-fisted attempt to soothe his pain at one point — that the relationships you have, and the things that happen when you’re a teen just won’t matter when you’re 38, the movie may speak to you. There’s an emotional core to this film, buried under all the layers of artifice, which peeks out in pleasing ways if you’re attuned to the admittedly solipsistic condition of being a teenager.
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Submarine
Directed by Richard Ayoade
Written by Richard Ayoade, based on the novel by Joe Dunthorne
Starring Noah Taylor, Yasmin Page, Noah Taylor, Sally Hawkins, Paddy Considine
Running time: 97 minutes
Rated R for language and some sexual content.
Opens today at Bethesda Row
