Young Adam: Some Thoughts

I can’t say what Young Adam was about. It has no meaning. It is aimless, but I think that that is the point. The main character is a drifter. A man with a fluid identity. He moves from here to there, things happen, things don’t happen …

All of the acting is, of course, fantastic. Tilda Swinton, Ewan McGregor, Emily Mortimer.

The story of a mysterious man (McGregor) working on a barge in Edinburgh, sharing the barge with an unhappy married couple and their small son.

The film unfolds slowly, everything in shades of blue, grey, or black, with nothing explanatory, almost no exposition. You have to figure it out as you go, nothing handed to you on a plate – and at the end of the movie I was still vaguely confused by one scene. I could not figure out the chronology at points. But I do believe that that was part of the point.

Ewan McGregor’s character is a man who seems to live outside of time. He lies. Constantly. But not because of any malignant reason. But just because he can. It’s maybe a kind of laziness. Or a self-protective thing. At the end of the movie, we still know very little about him.

3/4 of the way through the movie, it is revealed that the McGregor character was once working on a book. It was difficult to reconcile that image with the almost wordless nature of the character up until that point. He seemed like your basic Scottish working-class. Coal-blackened fingertips, ratty sweaters, working on the river, not saying much, playing darts, having some whiskey. So to find out he was a writer … Like: who the hell IS this guy?

He’s a kind of benign sexual predator. Like Ted Bundy without the murders, if you can imagine it. There was something creepy about it. Women were prey. Easily conquered. They also didn’t seem all that real to him. They were symbols, or just body parts – something. Hard to define. McGregor played this very subtly, but you could just see him zooming in on this woman, or that woman. You always saw his eyes moving around, when he was in a crowd, looking, looking, looking – for that new girl, the next conquest. There was no joy in it for him, though. It was like a shark hunting.

It was unexplained why he was that way. He was not a cruel man. There was a kindness in him, a humor. A gentlenss. Women obviously like that about the character, which explains why their panties would come off within 5 minutes of meeting him. But then, of course, they would fall in love with him, or have expectations of him, domestic expectations … and it was funny: one of them said something like, “Well, when we get married…” and you could hear the ripples of laughter through the audience. It was so completely obvious that this man could never get married. Ever.

But he was never clear about his intentions. Or even who he was.

You know nothing about him.

At one point, you see him throw his typewriter into the river. We don’t know why. He tells one girl that he’s moving to China. Of course, this is a lie. He meets up with one girl on the docks, a couple nights a week, and they have sex beneath one of the trucks, on the wet cobblestones. He doesn’t say much to her. She talks too much.

The movie begins with him pulling a nearly naked dead girl out of the river, up onto the dock. He calls the police. He seems upset. He has been shoveling coal. His face is black, his hands are black.

An obsession grows, with the dead woman. He wonders if the newspaper will mention his name, as the man who pulled her out. He tries to put together what happened to her, in his mind. He imagines her standing on a bridge, taking off the items of her clothing, one by one, before jumping. It’s almost like he is fantasizing about her suicide.

Meanwhile, he starts up a sex-thing with his friend’s wife played by Tilda Swinton (the one who lives with him on this weird cramped barge.)

The sex is passionate. But not in a Hollywood way. (The film got an NC-17 rating, which is outrageous. It’s just real sex, shown between real people. That’s what’s so shocking about it. It’s REAL. That ratings system has got to go. I am an adult.) These are damaged mysterious people with a lot of pain. And imperfect bodies. She has a big white scar across her stomach. They are not lit in a soft-focused Hollywood way. They are on a scratchy bed, in a teeny room, on a floating barge, with barrels of fish around. They are not lit like movie stars. He is like a drowning man, when he makes love to her. You just don’t see sex like that, in general, in Hollywood movies. There’s one astonishing scene where she begins weeping. It’s so real, so honest. He doesn’t stop what he’s doing – and eventually her weeping becomes sexual response. It’s intense.

But he doesn’t love her. Obviously.

He is nothing without conquering random women. They mean nothing to him.

This broody smoking coal-blackened man seems incapable of love. Except for maybe that typewriter on the bottom of the river.

And then there’s the dead girl he pulled out of the river … a relationship grows with her in his mind …

The film actually, in its slow strange way, is a thriller.

Odd intense movie. A light-hearted comedy. Perfect for a relaxing Saturday evening.