One of the biggest British hits when it was released in the country last year, I Swear has finally made its way to U.S. theaters. The biographical drama tells the story of John Davidson, who was diagnosed with Tourette syndrome as a teenager. As Davidson explains in the film (where he is played by BAFTA winner Robert Aramayo), it’s a neurological condition that is like “an impulse in my brain that tells me to do things or say things that I shouldn’t.” This means he swears. He twitches. He shouts. He says inappropriate things at inappropriate times. Most importantly, he cannot control these tics. Davidson’s story has been well-established in the UK, with the BBC making several documentaries about him over the years, including 1988’s John’s Not Mad. Now, this admirable, well-performed biopic looks at Davidson’s life and challenges whilst simultaneously raising awareness and understanding of Tourette’s.
1983, the Scottish border town of Galashiels. Davidson (Scott Ellis Watson, as the young version) is a relatively normal teenage boy: he has a job delivering newspapers, he’s into soccer (with a scout set to see him play in goal), and he has just started secondary school. Then his tics start to affect his everyday life. They also cause a rift with his mother Heather (Shirley Henderson), who, like the rest of the world at this time, is painfully unaware of his condition and unable to cope. Soon, he is forced to eat his dinner on the floor by the fireplace, lest his tics force him to spit up his food.
13 years later, in the late ’90s — the film skips Davidson’s participation in John’s Not Mad — John (Aramayo) is on medication and still living at home. Suddenly, he reunites with old friend Murray (Francesco Piacentini-Smith), who’s returned from Australia to be with his terminally ill mother Dottie (Maxine Peake). When John meets Dottie, a former mental health nurse, the first thing she does is invite him to move in with her. Then, after getting him off the medication, she helps him find work at the community center, as an assistant to Tommy (Peter Mullan). This will send John on the path to becoming a campaigner, helping others with Tourette’s and raising awareness.
I Swear fully revolves around John’s tics and coprolalia, as well the situations they lead to. Some of them are absurdly funny, like a game of blackjack going awry or how John’s attempt at being a drug mule is easily thwarted. This texture to the film makes sense considering writer-director Kirk Jones comes from a more comedic background, his most recent previous film being My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2. But other cirucmstances led to are more painful to behold, like when John is beaten with a crowbar or when a visit to a nightclub visit leads to disaster (and criminal charges). It’s interesting to observe how I Swear juggles these two seemingly disparate emotional registers, giving rise to bemused laughter with what John’s utterances at one moment while evoking deep sympathy in others as we see the condition wreck his life, sometimes in truly mortifying ways. In reality, this duality reflects the film’s primary interest, and perhaps the reason for its existence.
“I don’t think Tourette’s is the problem. I think the problem is we don’t know enough about Tourette’s,” Tommy says to John at one point. It’s a nice pearl of wisdom, one that John will later quote verbatim as he speaks to schools and police officers. And it becomes I Swear’s key philosophy. We see an unsympathetic head teacher whipping young John’s hand, thinking he is faking it. We see the judge at John’s trial fail to recognize his condition. Jones’ film is committed to imbuing an educational dimension to the proceedings, ensuring viewers exiting the theater will know far more about Tourette’s than when they entered, through a script constructed to by capture the lived reality of the condition.
An interesting wrinkle to I Swear is that it’s a film of extremely strong language that nonetheless fits into the well-worn template of traditional, feel-good British drama (think The Full Monty or The King’s Speech or a whole host of other Brit flicks that have come and gone in the past few decades). And as a biopic, it certainly goes through the usual beats and cliches like a checklist. The older mentor? Check. The troubled home life of the subject’s childhood? Check. New Order’s
“Blue Monday” on the soundtrack as a reminder we’re in the ‘80s? A piano score designed to tug at the heartstrings? The text at the end telling us where John is now? Check, check, and check. There is little novelty here beyond the material’s relative absence from cinematic canon. It’s also worth noting that I Swear actually opens in 2019, with Davidson getting an MBE from Queen Elizabeth. A curious choice with a humorous payoff (John shouting “Fuck the Queen!”), it’s clearly designed to estabish the film’s upbeat tenor to follow, tuning viewers to the foregone happy ending before they journey through every obstacle and bad moment John has to overcome. All told, in tandem with the fact that Jones is far from a formally adventurous filmmaker, and you’re left with a deeply conventional biopic beset with a bland visual character.
But what stops I Swear from being exclusively an exercise in mawkishness is its cast. Aramayo works overtime to elevate the material, inhabiting not just the physicality of Davidson and his involuntary tics, but also conveying a full emotional spectrum that moves from anxiety to joy to exhaustion, all of which is filtered through an undiluted layer of self-reproach. But it’s Aramayo’s profound amiability here that gives dimension to the film’s portrayal of a person suffering from Tourette’s, allowing things to move along more naturally than expected from typical narratives of this ilk.
Toward the end, Davidson is approached by two parents for help regarding their daughter, who also suffers from Tourette’s. Their conversation quickly evolves into the pair hurling obscenities, particularly C-bombs, at each other. Then there is a pause. A moment of silence and a fleeting look of understanding at each other, as the girl — presumably for the first time — sees something she’s otherwise only seen in a mirror’s reflection. This small moment affirms that, however repetitive and conventional I Swear is, it at least possesses the kind of deep empathy necessary to elevate this beyond the purely manipulative. Jones’ film is too obvious in its aims at being emotional and crowd-pleasing, but that doesn’t mean it it doesn’t still succeed in smaller, sometimes moving ways.
DIRECTOR: Kirk Jones; CAST: Robert Aramayo, Shirley Henderson, Peter Mullan, Maxine Peake; DISTRIBUTOR: Sony Pictures Classics; IN THEATERS: April 24; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 1 min.
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