The Red Riding Trilogy (Jarrold/Marsh/Tucker, 2009)

[John Cope]

Colin alluded to this over on the Awards Season thread, but now that it's starting to screen I wanted to establish a thread for it as I'm very interested in reactions, especially from any who have read the books. I have not yet done so myself (though they are sitting here in front of me) and, as I am in the US, I have no idea how long I'll have to wait to see the series myself, but Mark Fisher has had me sufficiently intrigued for awhile now. Cruise on over to his excellent blog (linked at the bottom of this essay) for a couple other pieces on David Peace and the series.

[Rsdio]

I haven't read any of his books (I feel I should have, if only out of solidarity towards a fellow Huddersfield Town fan) but I was staggered by the quality of the first installment and if it's the weakest of the three, as suggested in that blog, then the other two are really going to be something. Since I can't disagree with anything he's written about it there I'm happy to take him at his word.

[GaryC]

as I am in the US, I have no idea how long I'll have to wait to see the series myself

If you can play Region 2 PAL DVDs, Optimum are releasing the trilogy on 13 April.

I've recorded 1974 but not had a chance to watch it yet, so can't comment.

[colinr0380]

By the way this looks to be a year of David Peace adaptations as The Damned United is also upcoming.

[tojoed]

Details of the Optimum edition.

[thirtyframesasecond]

Does 4OD work outside of the UK? This is streaming the trilogy (the final part is broadcast tonoght). I get a pretty lousy picture on C4 so whilst I've watched the first two parts, I think watching them on 4OD again might make sense.

[MichaelB]

I doubt it - wouldn't there be horrendous rights complications? (Not least with actors' union Equity, which is generally less than keen on simultaneous international broadcasts without appropriate remuneration for its members?)

But I can't claim to be a 4OD expert, as it doesn't work on Macs even inside the UK!

[ianungstad]

IFC Films just put up the trailer for Red Riding. Looks fantastic!

[Anthony Thorne]

I saw these via the UK DVDs, which have also been released in Australia. Definitely worth watching. Some people go back and forth as to which entry they think is the best. All three are excellent but I prefer the first, then much of the second, and then a lot (but not all) of the third. There are reportedly four books in the series, and screenwriter Grisoni originally wrote four scripts. The unfilmed entry apparently sheds more light on a key character.

These are all beautifully atmospheric movies, with really top notch performances. There are some things that, having watched all three, don't quite 'add up', including an odd expansion of time at one point where years have passed but the depiction makes it seems like weeks, and some flashbacks reveal info that is never quite fully explained. That said I'm convinced these eccentric moments are deliberate, not lapses of judgement or logic, as the books themselves also teasingly use such methods, or so I've read. (The sequences in question are so deliberate that I can't believe the treatment of time is a gaffe).

A couple of actor's careers are going to get a big boost from this trilogy, as the keynote performances are phenomenal. There's also some exquisitely sly dialogue in the first entry that plays one way on a first viewing, but very differently once you've watched the whole trilogy. The first film, in fact, is a different experience on a second viewing, once you know where things are going, and who's responsible. Still, this isn't LAW AND ORDER: YORKSHIRE VICTIMS UNIT. The tone is darker, a few key characters don't exactly meet the happiest of endings, the direction of all three tease with Roegian flashbacks and blips of memory, the atmosphere is beautifully textured and the sense of an obsession dragging the leads into dark, dark places never really lets up throughout all three films. Minor characters from the first entry take leading roles in the third. The origin of a phone call in part one isn't revealed till the end of part three. There are other, subtler elements that work the same way, but it's obviously part of the fun to tease them out for yourself.

On a final, odd note, way back in the early 90's, I read an article in an early issue of the underground UK fanzine HEADPRESS, discussing conspiracy theories regarding the Yorkshire Ripper. A journalist was convinced there had been a partial cover up, and that there was more to the story that met the eye. He described a couple of incidents and alluded to a particular, well-known suspect who he thought was important. More recently, novelist David Peace has obliquely noted similar musings in interviews. Amusingly, the guts of the HEADPRESS article, and the carefully described suspect, both pop up in the RED RIDING films if you know where to look.

[MichaelB]

Thanks to this thread, I downloaded all three episodes (they're about a fiver on iTunes) and have just watched the first - which was phenomenally good. I was expecting upmarket TV, but this was visually, aurally and cinematically interesting enough to more than merit the big screen. I completely agree about the Roegian memory-blips, and I can't wait to see how things pan out.

In fact, I think I'll watch part two right now...

[ellipsis7]

There's a script for a 4th part, not yet made due to budgetary restrictions, and will have to wait as Ridley Scott has snapped up the movie rights to the whole thing, to relocate it to America etc... Red Riding Trilogy screened at Telluride last year to great reaction, and I believe it's getting some theatrical release stateside - IFC Films picked up North American rights, so it may eventually find its way to Criterion...

[Tribe]

Big article in the today's NY Times:

January 31, 2010
Film
Giving Serial Killings Serial Treatment
By NICOLAS RAPOLD

“IT’S getting dead murky, isn’t it?” says a detective in the “Red Riding” crime trilogy, a voyage into the decaying heart of Northern England in the 1970s and ’80s. This adaptation of three novels of the four-book series by the Yorkshire-born writer David Peace is an ambitious endeavor: it is shot by three directors, shares characters (though the protagonists shift) and mingles invention and fact. Like David Fincher’s 2007 serial-killer drama “Zodiac,” the “Red Riding” films are more about capturing an era than solving a mystery.

“Certain crimes allow you to examine a particular time and place,” Mr. Peace said when reached by telephone in West Yorkshire. He was speaking of the Yorkshire Ripper murders, in which a man named Peter Sutcliffe was jailed in 1981 for the deaths of 13 women over five years in Yorkshire and neighboring counties and whose crimes inspire the atmosphere and the events in Mr. Peace’s books and their three-part adaptation.

“What I was trying to figure out,” Mr. Peace continued, “was why did this happen here, and was there something in the way we behaved that made us somehow culpable? Or were we very unfortunate, that here was this evil man?”

The “Red Riding” trilogy, which opens Friday at the IFC Center but had its premiere last March on British television, conjures life in a benighted world of corrupt police and missing children, of weird secrets and guilt-ridden romance.

Eddie Dunford, the brash, callow reporter played by Andrew Garfield in the first of the three films, “Red Riding: 1974,” is only the first to question the established disorder. In the second, “Red Riding: 1980,” a detective (Paddy Considine) from Manchester is assigned to review the Ripper investigation, while “1983” tracks a feckless lawyer (Mark Addy) and a wavering cop (David Morrissey) in the aftermath.

The hellish experiences of these four characters are rendered through an unusual experiment in comparative style: each picture had its own director. Julian Jarrold, who shot “1974” on Super 16, creates a twisted noir and fuguelike atmosphere to depict Dunford’s investigation and doomed romance with a victim’s mother (Rebecca Hall).

On the telephone from London Mr. Jarrold, who also adapted “Brideshead Revisited” and “Crime and Punishment,” said that for one shot he told his director of photography “to come back with a ‘Lost Highway’ shot,” referring to David Lynch’s twisted and textured 1997 film.

Shot in Leeds, “1974” and its follow-ups delve into the notoriety of “the North” against a backdrop of block houses, humble sitting rooms, nuclear power plants, offices and pubs. The Northern creed and manner — tough and often humorously blunt — are epitomized in the films by the police and their allies. (According to the films’ screenwriter, Tony Grisoni, it’s all analogous to “what Jacobean English dramatists thought of Sicily.”)

The casts’ British stalwarts include Warren Clarke (once a droog in “A Clockwork Orange”) as a stonewalling police chief, Sean Bean as a cocksure developer, and Mr. Morrissey (who played Gordon Brown in “The Deal”).

“In Northern England it was quite grim, quite hard,” said Mr. Morrissey, who grew up in Liverpool in the ’70s. “There was a very white, working-class male world, which was very insular, and it was a very violent place.”

Mr. Morrissey, who stars in “1983” but appears in all three films, recalled the specter that seemed to hang over those years: “There was a sense that one world was closing and the other one was not ready to open.”

Because of budgetary restraints (all three films were done for a lean $9 million), the book that deals most directly with the Ripper, “Nineteen Seventy-Seven” was not filmed. But the haunting presence of the crimes feeds into the dread of “Red Riding: 1980,” which focuses on Peter Hunter (Mr. Considine), a Manchester detective who is investigating the local handling of the case. A creeping paranoia becomes the film’s dominant mood as Hunter’s inquiry is thwarted through misdirection and violence; meager solace comes from a wistful affair with a colleague.

Seeking to offset the nebulous threats working against the protagonist, the director, James Marsh, chose a clean, wide-screen look for this involuted middle story, shooting on 35 millimeter.

“I felt that Peter’s character was a very straight arrow, and I wanted the film to be really clear,” Mr. Marsh said in an interview in Manhattan.

Mr. Marsh is best known for the Oscar-winning documentary “Man on Wire,” but he also made “Wisconsin Death Trip,” which examined a Midwest town struck by myriad tragedies at the end of the 19th century. His “Red Riding” opens with an audiovisual overture of actual and fabricated radio and television reports of the crimes combined with recreated photos of victims.

(Mr. Peace, 43, who came of age at the height of the investigation into the Yorkshire murders, recalls the efforts to solicit the help of ordinary citizens: “They set up temporary sheds in every bus station where you could go in and listen to tape recordings of what they thought was the Ripper’s voice.”)

The unsolved killings in “Red Riding” and the portrait of Northern masculinity, brutality and corruption suggest a terrible sins-of-the-father burden borne by a beleaguered society. The full scope of the institutional rot always seems just out of reach, as if — in Mr. Grisoni words — “you’re seeing a tiny fraction, in the same way a child would.”

For the conclusion of the grim saga, “1983,” its director, Anand Tucker, used a Red One digital camera and introduces golden sunshine and a lighter touch. But horrific secrets still emerge in this story about a struggling lawyer (Mr. Addy) and a police officer (Mr. Morrissey), who grows shocked by the unsavory sides of his colleague’s extracurricular endeavors.

“I wanted an anti-noir, a light noir,” said Mr. Tucker, who made the homicide-free “Shopgirl” and “Leap Year.” “It’s two characters struggling to find the light, to find some hope or redemption.”

Taken together these varied visual formats and the ambitious historical canvas lend a cinematic scope that belies the trilogy’s original broadcast in three installments on Channel 4 in Britain. Andrew Eaton, its producer for Revolution Films, confirmed in an interview that theatrical distribution was always their ambition. For the American release IFC Films plans, at least initially, to release all 305 minutes of the films as “Red Riding: Special Roadshow Edition” with two intermissions, though they will also be available individually through video-on-demand.

The trilogy has already found interest from the director Ridley Scott for an American remake, which sounds like an unusual bit of cultural transposition until you learn that Mr. Peace himself wrote the source novels while abroad. From 1994 until recently he lived in Japan and taught English while writing.

Some inspiration for his “Red Riding” quartet came from the case of child killer Tsutomu Miyazaki, who was sentenced in 1997 and later executed for a series of grotesque murders, and Mr. Peace also recalls going to “Se7en” and “Zodiac” during his stay. It was also in Japan that he wrote other North-set novels, including “The Damned United” (which was adapted for film last fall) and “GB84” (awaiting production).

“I wrote six books, all about West Yorkshire,” Mr. Peace said, who has since returned to his storied hometown to be close to family. “It must have been a kind of homesickness. Although the West Yorkshire tourist board are not as proud of the Red Riding books.”

[Tribe]

I saw the first part of this, 1974, last night on Pay per view and I am very, very impressed at least with the first movie of the Trilogy. I found the story quite riveting and some very good performances. I'm impressed with the deft shifts in time, appearing to make the main protagonist fairly unreliable in the best noir tradition. I'm hoping the second installments are as good as this one.

[Tribe]

La Manohla's take on the Trilogy:

February 5, 2010
Men and Terror Run Wild

By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: February 5, 2010

The blood that runs through the “Red Riding” trilogy — three movies based on four crime books by the British author David Peace — begins as a river that races and then rages until it floods this dank, dark, pitiless world in misery. By the time the third movie finishes, some half dozen young girls will have been murdered, along with more than a dozen women. Men will have died as well, tormented by other men wearing smiles and sneers, and wielding fists, drills, lighted cigarettes, the usual guns and even a rat that ends splattered against a wall.

That rat is a reminder that the first book in Mr. Peace’s “Red Riding” quartet, titled “Nineteen Seventy-Four,” is an explicit nod to George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” and its infamous rodent of terror. The title of Mr. Peace’s book and the quartet as a whole — the other titles are “Nineteen Seventy-Seven,” “Nineteen Eighty” and “Nineteen Eighty-Three” — work as an obvious point of connection with that Orwell masterpiece, though there are more similarities, notably an enveloping sense of dread and a criminal gang that maintains its grip on the population through sadistic violence, all faithfully reproduced in the movies. Throw Irish hunger strikers and Thatcherism into the mix and set the whole thing in Yorkshire, the northern county birthplace of certain puddings and terriers and apparently endless horror. Stir.

The trilogy was adapted by Tony Grisoni, who has contributed to a few films by Terry Gilliam, including “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” and so has an acquaintance with excess. And the three movies, each directed by a different filmmaker for a combined 305 minutes, are nothing if not extreme: along with all the female corpses and the dead and wounded men, there are off-screen miscarriages, multiple instances of child abuse, intimations of incest, a firebombed house and several cremations, all shot from inside the chamber, no less, as if the camera were perched in the pyre. Shortly after the first film opens, the main character attends a wake. The second movie ends in a cemetery. There’s a wedding, but it looks like a downer.

Made for British television, the “Red Riding” trilogy is the latest in an estimable line of crime entertainments from across the pond, like the “Prime Suspect” cycle, with Helen Mirren as a supremely human detective, and the more recent mini-series “Five Days,” about a missing mother. The trilogy’s pulp-literary pedigree, one further buffed by several high-profile festival showings — last October it played in the New York Film Festival, where it was presented rather hopefully as “one of this year’s great cinematic events” — partly explains why it is being released in theaters in America. Starting on Friday, the movies will play back to back, with intermissions, for a week at the IFC Center in New York. Thereafter, they will be shown separately and also open elsewhere. (They’re already available on video on demand in some areas.)

Despite this unusual sendoff, the trilogy affords a fairly familiar immersion in contemporary British cinematic miserablism, where men and terror run wild, and beauty exists only in the cinematography and some of the performances. All else is horror. Certainly that’s true in the trilogy, which, starting with “Red Riding: 1974,” leaps into the void when a young Yorkshire journalist, Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield, not up to the leading-man task), realizes that the murder of a girl might be connected to a few earlier deaths, an insight that finds him first chasing after clues and then being chased in turn. The director Julian Jarrold shot the film in Super 16 millimeter, which gives the images atmospheric grit and swirling grain that, with the almost comically ubiquitous cigarette smoke, nicely thickens the air.

The second movie, “Red Riding: 1980,” glossed up with 35-millimeter film and directed by James Marsh with an elegant, self-conscious visual style at odds with the grunge milieu and desperate crimes — dead bodies are as attractively framed as some clouds reflected in a window — pivots on Peter Hunter (a solid Paddy Considine). An outsider brought into Yorkshire to conduct an internal review of the police investigation of the so-called (true life) Yorkshire Ripper murders, Hunter soon enough becomes the hunted. At the same time, a local detective, Maurice Jobson (David Morrissey), who appears in the background of the first movie, steps closer to the center, while a clergyman, Martin Laws (Peter Mullan), edges further into view. Both men become focal points in the final movie.

As the trilogy unwinds, the violence keeps the action hopping and you occasionally gagging, either in revulsion at its severity or at the tender, loving care with which it has been art directed. Meanwhile, some of the actors, notably Mark Addy, who plays a lawyer unkindly named Piggott in the third movie, and Rebecca Hall, who plays a grieving mother in the first, firmly hold your attention, which is striking, given that the story’s totalizing worldview doesn’t allow for much variation in human behavior. In a universe populated by victims and victimizers, there is screaming and shouting, but no joy, little laughter, barely any pleasure: when Piggott tells a joke, it proves more of a jolt than any death because it’s comparatively rare.

If the characters are generally deprived of life’s small and large pleasures, there is some enjoyment for the viewer, who can admire how different characters melt in and out of the trilogy, gaining and fading in importance, as supporting players in one movie become the star attractions in the next, and vice versa. A relatively minor player in the first film, for instance, a male hustler, B J (Robert Sheehan), steps forward in the second chapter only to jump into the spotlight in the third, becoming a force of change, an intermittent narrator and (weak) voice of conscience. Several members of the police force remain constants, including two professional sociopaths, Bob (an excellent, terrifying Sean Harris) and Tommy (Tony Mooney).

If you stick through to the end of the trilogy, you will be treated to further brutal displays, now in digital, as Anand Tucker, the director of the third movie, “Red Riding: 1983,” attempts to tie up the ragged ends through the combined efforts of B J, Maurice and Piggott, who each hurtle down to their own private hells via flurries of flashbacks. Although Mr. Tucker brings welcome warmth and unexpected humor to the series (thanks mainly to Mr. Addy), he stumbles badly when, after a teasing buildup, he reveals the marble-white body of a murdered girl who, while grossly disfigured, also looks as beautiful as a carved Della Robbia angel. The murderer has turned her ravaged body into an aesthetic exhibit, an assault Mr. Tucker mimics.

The “Red Riding” trilogy looks fine blown up on the big screen, though it’s easier to watch at home, where the remote offers fast relief from a grim fiction that, with its murky palette and unyielding cruelty, serves up a nihilistic vision that is unyielding, hermetic, unpersuasive and finally self-indulgent. What matters most in the books is Mr. Peace’s scatting prose and imaginative hijacking of real tragedies for his Grand Guignol fantasies, which brings to mind James Ellroy (“L.A. Confidential”), but danker and without the obvious glee that Mr. Ellroy takes in his own work. What matters in the movies are some of the performances and the slickly packaged sadism. Nothing else on screen is at stake, certainly not life or hope.

In 1940, a year after Britain declared war on Nazi Germany, Orwell wrote that ours was a “shrinking world” in which, the “ ‘democratic vistas’ have ended in barbed wire.” In the “Red Riding” movies that world has shrunk to the size of a pebble: it’s hard, unblemished by variation and very, very small. And the democratic vistas aren’t behind barbed wire: they’re nonexistent, which makes for entertaining nightmares but not dreams.

“There is less feeling of creation and growth,” Orwell continued, “less and less emphasis on the cradle, endlessly rocking, more and more emphasis on the teapot, endlessly stewing. To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay. It has ceased to be a strenuous attitude and become a passive attitude — even ‘decadent,’ if that word means anything.”

[bearcuborg]

If you live in or near NYC, go see it... I'm still shaken.

[knives]

San Diego, at the Kensington, will be having all three from March 12-18, with the last day and the 14th doing a threesome.

[Caged Horse]

I think I liked this better when it was called Zodiac, without the overcooked addition of full-on JFK-style conspiro-paranoia (and a dash of the UK's early-90s "satanic-cult child abuse" hysteria thrown in for good measure).

[bearcuborg]

I think I liked this better when it was called Zodiac, without the overcooked addition of full-on JFK-style conspiro-paranoia (and a dash of the UK's early-90s "satanic-cult child abuse" hysteria thrown in for good measure).

The real thrill of Red Riding is that it does not follow traditional narrative threads with payoffs, or spell itself out like Zodiac. I would suspect most audiences for Red Riding won't have a background in avant-garde cinema, I'm not sure if you did prior to seeing the trilogy but if you remove yourself from your comfort zone you might see that this impressive piece of work eclipses Zodiac.

[Caged Horse]

I think Peace's next books should be about how the CIA fitted up Ian Huntley, Mossad's secret involvement in the Port Arthur Massacre and the Freemasons' role at Dunblane. Psychotic, paranoid conspiracies are much more sexy than the messy realities of madness, incompetence and investigation so brilliantly detailed in Zodiac.

And this will be my last post on this forum.

[NABOB OF NOWHERE]

And this will be my last post on this forum.

Should we close the stable door ...or is it too late?

[bearcuborg]

I think Peace's next books should be about how the CIA fitted up Ian Huntley, Mossad's secret involvement in the Port Arthur Massacre and the Freemasons' role at Dunblane. Psychotic, paranoid conspiracies are much more sexy than the messy realities of madness, incompetence and investigation so brilliantly detailed in Zodiac.

And this will be my last post on this forum.

I suppose it's my fault; I walked into a trap with a troll, but if the others hate you-I don't even know you. I see your point, and I don't want to dismiss the qualities of Zodiac, but Red Riding goes above the "messy realities of madness" (nicely put) without succumbing to level of conspiracies you described. Red Riding in the end is richer than Zodiac because of its mythic qualities. It calls for repeated viewings because it has mysteries to be revealed, Zodiac-a fine piece of craftsmanship, has no such mystery to reveal.

[bearcuborg]

You lost me on Inglorious Basterds being "revolutionary." I've read and discussed with friends on the defense that film (which I felt was momentarily entertaining at best, and nothing more), but I would say with confidence that IB could not be confused with revolutionary on any level. As for The Wire comparison, I think that argument can be made. I'm hoping they'll do 1977 one day too.

[Phil]

Red Riding in the end is richer than Zodiac because of its mythic qualities. It calls for repeated viewings because it has mysteries to be revealed, Zodiac-a fine piece of craftsmanship, has no such mystery to reveal.

Honest question: what exactly do you find the mysteries to be revealed here to be?

For me, the whole thing was a series of severely diminishing returns (in line with the quality of the central performances), starting off as sort of engaging genre work in the first and devolving into a tedious compendium of noir cliches by the third, which feels less like a movie than it does a series of clips solely intended to complicate what came before it in not very interesting ways. I just don't see a single mysterious thing going on here: if anything, that was my biggest issue with it, that at every moment it was too bluntly literal to point that it all turned into a big wash of miserablism paid off in the end by what could be the cheesiest shot I've ever seen in an ostensibly serious movie.

SpoilerShow

I'm talking about fat dude rising from the floor in sparkling light carrying his little angel while feathers fall around them.

Zodiac, on the other hand, is a work of terror-mystery (though its mysteries don't have answers to be found - it's about the process) on par with The Crying of Lot 49 or 2666 (this isn't to say it's not cinematic, the two best comparisons from a thematic standpoint just happen to come from literature); it's endlessly more dynamic in its handling of the world than Red Riding, which just totally lost me about halfway into the 2nd with its total aversion to anything resembling restraint or subtlety and only got worse from there.

[Tribe]

Honest question: what exactly do you find the mysteries to be revealed here to be?

For me, the whole thing was a series of severely diminishing returns (in line with the quality of the central performances), starting off as sort of engaging genre work in the first and devolving into a tedious compendium of noir cliches by the third, which feels less like a movie than it does a series of clips solely intended to complicate what came before it in not very interesting ways. I just don't see a single mysterious thing going on here: if anything, that was my biggest issue with it, that at every moment it was too bluntly literal to point that it all turned into a big wash of miserablism paid off in the end by what could be the cheesiest shot I've ever seen in an ostensibly serious movie.

I also found the "mystery" not terribly mysterious to begin with and whatever "mystery" there was unimpressive, but ultimately unimportant for me. What's carried this so far me (and I haven't seen the third installment yet) are the atmosphere, the camera work (particularly in the first installment), the story and the performances. What most fascinates me is the sordid atmosphere of corruption. Without the corruption angle, which is excellently done and carries the trilogy (so far), it would just be another serial killer movie trying to be Fincher's Seven.