Of life and art

Small Faces paints the fall from innocence

by Peter Keough

SMALL FACES. Directed by Gillies MacKinnon. Written by Gillies and Billy MacKinnon. With Iain Robertson, Joseph McFadden, J. Steven Duffy, Laura Fraser, Garry Sweeney, Clare Higgins, Kevin McKidd, Mark McConnochie, Steven Singleton, David Walker, and Ian McElhinney. An October Films release. At the Kendall Square Cinema.

The first image of Gillies and Billy MacKinnon's brutal and magical Small Faces arrests the eye and the imagination: two boys in a shady wood dance about a tree. On the back of one rides a skeleton. It's a world where gaiety co-exists with mortality and innocence is forever being darkened by evil. And it's captured in Small Faces with a luminous concreteness of detail and the sweeping narrative of myth.

Set in Glasgow in 1968, it's the tale of the three MacLean brothers -- tormented and dangerous Bobby (J. Steven Duffy), the eldest; steady and ambitious younger Alan (Joseph McFadden); and rambunctious and visionary 12-year-old Lex (Iain Robertson). They live with their widowed mother in Govanhill, the center of a whimsical urban inferno. Lex, the boy with the skeleton on his back, is full of beans and impishness but submits to his family bonds. The memento mori is a gift for Alan, who uses it for anatomy studies in his art work. Lex draws too, and the two brothers get along well, avoiding for the most part the brutality of the street.

Bobby, however, is a different story. Prone to nightmares about his own (or is it his father's?) death, he explodes into lethal pranks. He dumps all the fish food into the bowl, killing Lex's only pet, and later in fit of directionless rage will pound the skeleton to fragments with a hammer. Predictably, the allure of joining the local gang, the Glen, is irresistible. Part of the appeal is its head, Charlie Sloan (Garry Sweeney), a dapper art fancier (he buys one of Alan's drawings) and sociopath. Soon Bobby is out dashing past burning trashcans in the night, knocking the shit out of members of the rival Tongs gang with a three-foot spanner (he has a flair for oversized hardware).

Bobby has a good heart, however. Eager to reconcile himself with Lex, he gives the boy an air pistol. That gift is the means by which Lex is drawn into the gangs: the first time he fires the gun he hits Tongs chieftain Malky Johnson (Kevin McKidd), a vicious psycho with no claims to culture. For protection, Lex appeals to Sloan and the Glen.

The resulting tale of fraternal bonds and betrayals set against the fanciful and primitive background of tribal warfare emerges somewhat murkily, propelled not so much by skillful narrative as by the poetry of the images, the intensity of the acting, and the archetypal emotions that underlie the whole. Robertson's Lex triumphs in the all-too-easily abused role of the adolescent falling headlong from innocence to inexperience. Duffy's Bobby is scary and heartbreaking in his depiction of uncomprehended passion and pain. As Alan, McFadden is appropriately neutral and self-centered.

The only problem with these actors is that they look so much alike. It makes the early going hard to follow, and the dense Glaswegian accents don't help much. MacKinnon can be a little stingy or oblique with information. For example, during an early party scene it takes a while to grasp that Andrew (Ian McElhinney) is the boys' uncle, not their father, that their mother (Clare Higgins) is a widow, and that essentially Andrew is making moves on his dead brother's wife.

Then again, there are so many other things going on in that scene that you can't blame MacKinnon for underplaying one of them. It's an example of his knack for subtly changing the tone of a moment from levity to suspense to utter outrage. As his family and neighbors chit-chat and reminisce, Lex has been playing that old boyish trick of secretly swiping sips from his elders' glasses. His growing, goofy inebriation seems funny until something behind his eyes is tripped and he flies into a murderous rage at Bobby.

At its most powerful, though, Small Faces goes beyond narrative and drama to attain the stasis and sublimity of poetry. A painter, MacKinnon clearly finds his inspiration in the exact and ineffable image, and there are plenty in this film, from the haunting emblem of the opening onward. Perhaps the most beautiful and terrible is a scene in which a pleasant skating party ends with a man getting stabbed to death. From high above we see the dead man dragged across the white plane of the rink, his blood crossing the ice like a brush stroke. A cut is made to Lex's face -- it was with his eyes that we had witnessed this -- and though the face is small, it contains the suffering and disillusionment of the world.