Nil by Mouth.

Produced by Luc Besson, Douglas Urbanski, and Gary Oldman; written and directed by Gary Oldman; cinematography by Ron Fortunato; production design by Hugo Luczyc-Wyhowski; edited by Brad Fuller; music by Eric Clapton; starring Ray Winstone, Kathy Burke, Charlie Creed-Miles, Laila Morse, Jamie Forman, Edna Dore and Chrissie Cotterill. Color, 128 mins. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Gary Oldman's first film, Nil by Mouth centers on the life of a destructive, and self-destructive, underclass English family. The family is part of a white, South London, dysfunctional world where almost everybody is permanently unemployed and lives on the dole, with the men having spent much of their lives in prison. The film gives no political or social explanations for the family's situation, but treats their unredeemable lives as a result solely of their own behavior. Oldman models the film after the work of John Cassavetes and Ken Loach films like Cathy Come Home and Ladybird, Ladybird (without their political and social agenda) rather than the formulaic Hollywood films that he has acted in ever since he came to Hollywood from England.

Oldman grew up in South London, so he intimately knows the milieu's look and vernacular (harsh, expletive-filled talk that is hard for an American audience to decipher), and avoids any hint of artifice or caricature in depicting it. Nil by Mouth plunges the audience into this desolate world without any establishing shots. It begins in a working-class pub with the film's garrulous, brutal central figure, Ray (Ray Winstone), sitting at a table with his loyal stooge, Mark (Jamie Forman), exchanging stories about orgies and planning a scam that includes his wife's ferretlike, junkie brother, Billy (Charlie Creed-Mills).

The film's extremely loose narrative does little with the scam, since Oldman focuses on the behavior of his characters, not on building tension or creating a strong, consistent plot. The camera observes a pathetic, filthy Billy begging on the subway, hanging around aimlessly on the street, ineffectually engaging in petty crime, and hungrily pursuing his next drug score. It then cuts to Ray, his sweating, bloated, raw face seen in tight-close-up. We watch him drink vodka straight from the bottle, snort a great deal of coke, and act in a sadistic and self-pitying manner. He casually beats somebody up outside a shop, bites off a piece of Billy's nose after he robs his drugs one night, and, in a fit of drunken jealousy, stomps on his wife Val (Kathy Burke) so badly that she miscarries their baby and looks, for a time, like a gargoyle. (Oldman never exploits the violence, however, shooting the beating off screen.)

Ray is an overweight, self-hating bully - an uncontrolled, raging force - without a single saving grace. In a drunken haze, miming boxing moves, he tearfully talks to his mirror image (a touch of Scorsese), speaking about his love for Val, and the need to punish himself for his behavior. Of course, his self-awareness is merely momentary, for he then totally demolishes the council fiat he and Val live in. In another scene he indulges in an overlong monologue about his childhood pain, lachrymosely recalling a hated father who gave no kisses, cuddles, or love. Oldman inserts it as a partial explanation for Ray's behavior, but in no way absolves or explains away his abusiveness.

The women of the family - Ray's wife Val, her mother, Janet (Laila Morse), who is the only character who holds a job, and her grandmother, Kath (Edna Dore) - inhabit a separate, more stable, and caring world. They sit apart from the men in the pub, their relations with them dominated by a need either to fend off and repulse violence or pick up the broken pieces after the men commit one self-destructive and destructive act after another. A wrinkled, gray-haired Kath, who is in her late seventies, has to flee a drunken Ray (dressed in his underwear) when he grossly propositions her. Billy visits his mother, Janet, at her factory job, and, angrily shouting and cursing, demands cash to help feed his [pounds]60 a day habit. In that instance she refuses, but in another melancholy scene she drives him to his connection and sits in the front seat of the van as we see him, in great detail, shoot up in back.

A teary but volatile Ray tries to get back with Val, constantly harassing her with silent phone calls, violently trying to break into her mother's flat, and finally, with hard rain pouring down, bringing her a gift and telling her he still loves her. Val, who is thirty but looks a bruised, worn, suffering fifty, responds that, "He has a funny way of showing it," and, without high drama, searingly bemoans the life of alienation, pain, and oppression he has handed her. It's the one moment Val speaks back to Ray, since the women in Oldman's film masochistically accept their fate as victims of male rage and control.

Still, the women provide a network of emotional support for each other, and have a capacity for hope and kindness that the men lack. Kath and Val's daughter (who mutely watches all that goes on), let go of a red balloon and watch it float skyward - one faint metaphor of escape from their entrapment. In an ironically moving scene Kath and Val dance to "Last Chance to Paradise," and Janet rallies around Val after she's been beaten up by Ray.

The film focuses on claustrophobic interiors, but we do get a look at the scrub grounds of dismal council estates, playgrounds, and hallways scarred with graffiti, streets filled with debris, and a generally gray world where the rains never end. Oldman shoots the interiors in soft light, and avoids shooting the exteriors in sunlight so he can preserve the murky, dark, half-lit look of things. Shot mostly in close-up, there are a few striking long shots of Billy, utterly isolated within the frame, walking through the grounds of council estates. There is a cinema-verite look to the film, with Oldman's camera catching the faces of people in Soho strip clubs, South London pubs, and nighttime streets. He also sometimes obscures part of the image by having somebody pass in front of the camera - a directorial choice rather than an accident.

Nil by Mouth may have the feel of a documentary, but from Eric Clapton's vivid, bluesy score to the probing close-ups that get inside its characters, this is a carefully crafted and detailed realist film that is never visually dull. Oldman makes few wrong turns, except the too-theatrical set piece that Billy's tattooed friend Angus (Jon Morrison) indulges in when he repeats verbatim, gestures and all, Dennis Hopper's mad monologue from Coppola'a Apocalypse Now. Oldman has chosen neither to sentimentalize, judge, nor patronize these members of the London underclass, whom he knows so intimately. Oldman feels no need to mention Thatcher or Tory economic policies to give this world a social context. For him, "People are politics, it's not the other way around." He simply observes them with a clear-eyed view that sticks to what is true, and serves no larger moral or social purpose.

Two scenes sum up his view of this milieu. Billy tries to hit up for cash a man who is sitting with his son in an estate playground. The man refuses, but, when he walks away, we get a peek at his son's face and it looks terrifyingly demonic. Oldman suggests that there is no innocence here, the virulent cycle of destruction beginning with childhood. Another scene sees Kath in a pub passionately singing, without a touch of irony, "I can't help loving that man of mine." A more conventional director would have underlined the absurdity of those words in this context, but Oldman remains faithful to his characters' perspective, knowing that the women learn to adjust to a male universe where misogyny is the norm. Men treat women like dogs, and the prime emotional links in a marriage are never between husband and wife, but between a man and his buddies.

What we learn from Oldman about this dead-end, South London world leads logically and jarringly to the film's final scene. Val is back with Ray, and the other members of the family, including the omnipresent Mark, are sitting around telling stories about Billy, whom they are going to visit in prison. They joke and laugh about the severe problems Billy has there (somebody wants to kill him), none of it daunting or disturbing them. Going to prison is an integral part of their ethos, something to make the best of (Val is totally at home with criminal argot). Just as they stoically accept that Val has reconciled with the frightening Ray, who will likely savage her again. Val may become enraged at Ray's abuse, but she's ultimately accepting and complicit with it. The scene suggests something even more ominous - that Ray's nuzzling closeness to his young daughter could turn into something sexually manipulative and abusive as she grows older.

For Oldman, Nil by Mouth is an auspicious debut. He elicits emotionally revealing performances from his actors that rarely strike a false note. Though less interested in the social world, he depicts enough of its texture to capture its barren grimness. This relentless, agonizing film is not The Full Monty - nobody leaves the theater feeling buoyant or sanguine about the human condition. It's also no Mike Leigh film, for there are few unpredictable shifts in emotional tone, or scenes that evoke absurd or comic behavior. (Oldman, of course, deals with an underclass, not the working class that populates most of Leigh's films.) What Nil by Mouth grants an audience is an unsparing look into a world so particularized and real that all sociological paradigms, political abstractions, or wish fantasies seem meaningless.

Leonard Quart

Leonard Quart is coauthor of American Film and Society Since 1945 and How the War Was Remembered: Hollywood and Vietnam