Metro Pulse/Movie Guru/Liam

Movie Guru Rating:
Enlightening (4 out of 5)

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Liam shows the political in the personal

by Jesse Fox Mayshark

Things happen for a reason. I had a friend who used to say that. This was a friend to whom a good many things had happened, most of them difficult and some genuinely tragic. In her calmer moments, she would light up a cigarette (if there wasn't something stronger at hand), and say, "Things happen for a reason."

I would just nod. Who can argue with that? Things do happen for a reason. For multiple reasons, usually. People kill themselves or each other, dogs get hit by cars, love turns to disgust, airplanes crash into buildings. There are reasons for all of it.

You'll notice, however, my friend's statement ended in a period, not a question mark or a colon. She was not asking what the reasons might be, nor elucidating them. Not that she wasn't perceptive or insightful—she was, when she chose to be. But when it all got to be too much, the misery and complexity and weight of all the causes and effects, she would retreat to her default: "Things happen for a reason." Sometimes the reason was attributed to a vaguely defined god, other times to forces of nature and the universe, but implicit either way was the sense that the reason itself was unknowable.

I've heard those words, or at least that tone, a lot in the past month. The most immediate reaction after the hijackings and murders of September 11 was the simple word: "Why?" This made sense at first. But over the next few weeks, as many Americans (including myself) scrambled to make up for our pathetically deficient understanding of the complicated politics and alliances and anger of the modern Middle East, I noticed there were still a lot of people who seemed stuck on "Why?" Not as if they expected or even wanted answers, but as if that reaction in itself was all they could muster—as if accepting that they lived in a world where such things could happen, had happened, was too much of a blow to absorb.

This seems dangerous. Understandable, maybe, but dangerous nonetheless. We cannot go to sleep and wake up in the morning and find all our old illusions of security restored. We cannot raise our children in a world where the World Trade Center doesn't get blown up. That world doesn't exist anymore. And there are reasons for it, many many reasons, and the first thing to do is to stop asking the question and start sifting through the answers.

All of this has nothing in particular and everything in general to do with the movie Liam, British director Stephen Frears' absorbing drama about one family in 1930s Liverpool. Shown mostly from the confused viewpoint of a 7-year-old boy (newcomer Anthony Borrows), it paints in miniature the origins of social, economic and political upheaval.

Life is hard for the working class in Depression-era Britain, but at the start of the film, Liam's Catholic family is doing all right. His father (identified in the film simply as "Dad," and played by Ian Hart) has a good job in the Liverpool steelyards, and his older brother (David Hart) is working too. To bring in a little extra, his 12-year-old sister, Teresa (Megan Burns), takes a job cleaning the elegant home of a wealthy family. In a telling scene, Teresa feels compelled to lie to her new employer about her family's religion; the woman simply smiles and says, "We're Jewish. Is that all right?"

But then the steelyards close. Liam's father, a fiercely proud man, refuses to demean himself either before the parish priest or potential employers, and the family is soon behind on rent and struggling to buy food. Liam's teenage brother starts attending socialist worker rallies, which are broken up violently by police squads. Liam's dad turns in the opposite direction, fulminating against the church, Irish immigrants willing to work for low wages, and the Jewish factory owners who employ them.

Meanwhile, Liam is approaching his first confession and Communion, under the tutelage of a fire-and-brimstone priest and schoolteacher, and also just beginning to hear schoolyard rumors about the mysteries of reproduction. A pint-sized boy with a debilitating stammer, he struggles to articulate his questions about it all and often finds himself unable to speak when required to.

It is superficially reminiscent of Angela's Ashes, but it's really more akin to The Tin Drum. Like Frears' earlier politically aware films (My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid), Liam locates its carefully drawn characters in a specific world, one that shapes their options and actions. And in Liam, it provides an almost-mute witness, a boy whose voice deserts him in the face of an incomprehensible world. Frears comes from a generation of British filmmakers shaped by both the 1960s and the Thatcher era, a generation acutely aware of the way class, race and religion reverberate through the British economy and culture.

Among other things, the movie reminds us that before Britain entered the second World War, it (like most of Europe) had a strong and growing fascist movement. And in Liam's father, it gives us an initially sympathetic man driven by circumstances into a search for someone to blame, something to fight against. Thanks to strong performances, all of it is convincing and carefully detailed—at least, until a final shocking turn, which is as contrived as it is painful. Even then, Frears doesn't lose sight of the people at the center of his tableau.

Horrible things happen. And there are reasons for them. Liam shows you some of them.