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       #Post#: 156--------------------------------------------------
       BRIGHTON ROCK (2010)
   DIR By: agate
       Date: February 5, 2014, 6:33 pm
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       Brighton Rock stands out among the Graham Greene novels I have
       read because of its setting. I associate Greene’s best work with
       far-flung settings–Africa, Mexico–but Brighton Rock captures the
       seedy, down-at-heel milieu of the seaside town of Brighton. As I
       recall the novel opens with a preliminary statement or epigraph
       telling us that Brighton rock is a candy well known in Brighton:
       a long column of hard candy with the word “Brighton” indelibly
       in its center so that you keep eating the candy, but you never
       get rid of that word “Brighton.” That statement, its position as
       a prelude to the novel, along with the title, should tell us
       that the candy–the type of candy it is–is central to the story.
       That doesn’t come through in this movie, which updates the 1938
       novel and sets it in about 1964. This change works fairly well
       although the Brighton of the 1930s may have been the kind of
       place where you were apt to find someone like Pinkie, the
       psychopathic teenage hood, just because of the rackets that were
       probably so prevalent there at the time. I’m not so sure that
       the Brighton of the 1960s would have been similar, and the
       dialogue sometimes isn’t the sort of speech that would have been
       spoken in the 1960s as well.
       Critics have faulted the movie for jettisoning the Catholicism
       of the novel, and, though I haven’t read the novel in many
       years, the movie left a very different impression on me. A scene
       with the naive Rose praying the rosary under a crucifix and
       another scene involving nuns in a hospital or home for unwed
       mothers at the end do not constitute Greene’s Catholicism as it
       is usually reflected in his fiction.
       Any statements about the Brighton rock candy, which Pinkie uses
       to murder one of his victims, are pretty much pushed into the
       background.
       Don’t viewers wonder why the movie had this title?
       Then there is the ending. I don’t recall the book’s ending but
       it certainly wasn’t the one this movie has.  Rose, still
       stricken by Pinkie’s violent death and about to give birth to
       his child, finally gets around to listening to a record she’d
       wanted him to make while they were together. As gaga as she has
       been over Pinkie, it’s a bit too much of the long arm of
       coincidence that when she finally has a chance to listen to it
       (some nine months later by my calculation), the record just
       happens to stick at the very point where she would have found
       out that Pinkie’s statements were full of venom against her.
       Eventually she’ll get the record unstuck, of course, and maybe
       we can reassure ourselves that she will come to her senses at
       that point.
       The acting seems excellent throughout, however–especially Helen
       Mirren as Ida and Andrea Riseborough as Rose.  And there are
       many scenes of Brighton that probably capture exactly the
       Brighton Greene described–rundown, crowded, sleazy–and dwarfed
       by the powerful ocean. The movie was well worth watching for
       those scenes alone.
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