Since his starring role in 2023’s Oppenheimer, a role that made him a bona fide Hollywood A-lister and won him an Academy Award, Cillian Murphy has been seen on screen in just two films, neither on anywhere near a similar scale. There was last year’s Small Things Like These, a solid, sensitive drama about a troubled man under considerable pressure, going to great personal lengths to do the right thing, directed by Tim Mielants. And now there’s this year’s Steve, where Murphy again plays a troubled man under considerable pressure, going to great personal lengths to do the right thing, again directed by Tim Mielants.
This one’s less solid, however. Steve is the co-head of Stanton Wood, a residential school for teenage boys whose wayward behavior has rendered them unsuitable for traditional education. The staff are harried, the students are wild, the school’s financiers are trepidatious, politicians are dismissive, and a camera crew on site for a documentary piece are just getting in the way on the particularly dramatic, decisive day over which the movie largely takes place. It has all the elements of a hackneyed heartwarmer, a contrived slice-of-life drama about the value of compassion. Despite Mielants’ efforts to furnish the story with as many rough edges as possible, that’s precisely what it is.
Mielants’ efforts are all window dressing, anyway. No amount of ‘90s jungle music on the soundtrack nor upside-down zooms and whizzing tracking shots can negate the easy sentimentality of writer Max Porter’s scenario, adapted from his own novel. The teachers are uniformly noble souls, so devoted to their duties they’re devoid of genuine conflict – Steve’s addiction to pain meds doesn’t count, since it’s tied to a predictably melodramatic motivation. The boys are uniformly misunderstood, cast out by a society unsympathetic to the good souls they all possess beneath their misplaced rage and unchecked braggadocio. And the school’s benefactors, with their cold feet and colder hearts, are uniformly smug, smooth-talking posh types, drawing neat, simplistic lines between the characters. There’s a clear concerted attempt at verisimilitude in the movie’s casual dialogue exchanges, roving camera movements, and frantic energy, but the story and characters are straight out of a soap opera subplot.
This is the sole source of conflict in Steve, between a manufactured sense of authentic reality and an authentic sense of manufactured dramaturgy. The issues covered here – and this is most certainly an Issue Movie – are valid, believable topics given the setting but, condensed into a 24-hour time frame, they accrue into quasi-comical coincidence. Every problem facing staff and students alike must be hashed out over what’s presented as a single day; it doesn’t help that Porter and Mielants emphasize each detail. Almost nothing is left to suggest — a close-up on Steve’s pill bottle so the audience knows it’s oxycodone; a verbal comment on an already audible rainstorm so the audience knows it really is pissing down; every emotion vocalized, every action explained. Our hands are held so tightly through the story it’s difficult not to feel like we’re being led, rather than exploring our own way through it.
Naturally, such emotionally explicit material as this is a gift for the actors, if not for the viewers, so the film does have its bright spots. The cast is strong, especially the young performers, while the more experienced cast members, including Murphy, Tracey Ullman, and Emily Watson (also seen in Small Things Like These), are saddled with unsubtly pushing plot points and emotional beats, and do perhaps the best they can. When all are allowed the space to simply explore their characters, Steve is a perfectly fine piece of slightly dated social realism. But its contrivances keep shunting their way to the fore, insisting that the viewer’s nerves are piqued and heart is warmed, rather than letting that happen organically. Never mind Oppenheimer’s three-hour runtime and nuclear bombs — this is the most bombastic Cillian Murphy film to date.
DIRECTOR: Tim Mielants; CAST: Cillian Murphy, Tracey Ullman, Jay Lycurgo; DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix; STREAMING: September 19; IN THEATERS: October 3; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 33 min.
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