The cinema of Clio Barnard takes place in corners of the world familiar to those living in, or near, them, but invisible to those living further afield. For many moviegoers around the world, the idea of British cinema surely conjures up pictures of romantic lifestyles of corsets and bustles, horse-drawn carriages, royalty and nobility. But everyday British life is, for most, as far from those pictures as anyone’s life is, anywhere in the world. Barnard’s kitchen sink dramas, mostly set in working class urban areas, are romantic about their characters, not their lifestyles. They have the unmistakable, humble patina of realism about them.
It’s a shame, then, that I see Buildings Fall Like Lightning fails to honor the realism it courts, and indeed achieves in its situational detail. The people feel real, their circumstances genuine, the sets and costumes true to this milieu, and the matter-of-fact accuracy of Barnard’s depiction of these elements, too seldom seen in movies, remains as welcome now as it always has been. But writer Enda Walsh betrays all of it with melodramatic plotting, devising a soap opera storyline in all but its lack of camp. It’s gritty realism without the grit.
The shame lies principally in the promise displayed in the characters, a quintet of friends in their late 20s or early 30s, each drawn and performed with care and compassion. Pals since their school years, they’ve all stayed relatively close, though one, Rian (Joe Cole), has left their native Birmingham for London, having made millions in real estate development. It’s less the geographical distance that causes the first of several cracks in their collective friendship than it is the financial distance — Rian is living a vastly different life than the others, even if, to them, he remains the same working class Brummie kid he’s always been.
Walsh’s script, adapted from Keiron Goddard’s book, is most astute in how it elucidates the way in which each character’s past informs their present, as the five approach some potentially crucial turning points in their lives — Conor (Daryl McCormack) is expecting a baby while overseeing the construction on a new apartment block, in partnership with Rian, while Oli (Jay Lycurgo) seeks to give up dealing drugs to go straight. For Rian, making it out of Birmingham and up through society represents making it out of his past, yet his new life is a lonely one in which he’s profoundly out of place. His past has followed him out despite achieving his dreams; for those still living in theirs, their troubles arise from reckoning with the failure of their dreams. Patrick (Anthony Boyle) makes a meager living as a delivery driver, providing for the family he shares with Shiv (Lola Petticrew). It’s anything but the living he expected, being apparently the only one of the five with a university degree.
He may not be making use of his degree, but the movie certainly does. In one painfully on-the-nose scene, Patrick delivers Rian an impassioned lecture about the fundamental humanitarian purpose of housing, specifically social housing, and the British state’s negligence in providing it since the Thatcher years of the 1980s. It’s difficult to disagree with him, but his monologue is surely the most artless method Barnard and Walsh could have found to make such a simple point. Occurring midway through the movie, what had to that point been an engaging portrait of five appealing people takes a nosedive into a simplistic, relentlessly obvious melodrama, devoid of sense or subtlety.
The importance of housing is secondary, however, to that of relationships — in this milieu, people come first, so any ruptures in the relationships have cataclysmic effects. But the plot finds nowhere interesting to go with these ruptures, constructing cheap clichés out of them. One single infidelity is treated as a most heinous betrayal, a few innocuous tiffs lead to addiction and depression, and screaming matches ensue, turning a once-sensitive exploration of friendship into corny amateur dramatics.
This might have been more compelling in a more heightened environment, or in service to some affected costume drama, but in a would-be gritty realist movie it feels reductive, even insulting to the reality it purports to portray. Barnard and Walsh have applied the old corsets and carriages conventions to a world they just don’t fit into, and the movie’s increasingly aggressive tugs on the heartstrings thus come across as manipulative and unnecessary. The patina of realism is subsequently exposed as a mere patina, and I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning is revealed as just another silly soap opera.
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