For Reel

Director: Andrea Arnold

Andrea Arnold’s (“Red Road”) second directorial effort, “Fish Tank”, seems like a worthy successor to the great British Angry Young Men films from the 1960’s. Like Tom Courtenay in “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” or “Billy Liar”, Mia (Katie Jarvis) is at once at sea and harnessed to the ocean floor. There appears to be no growth potential – she’s doomed to life in a bleak housing project, adrift in need of affection.

Under the supervision of a hopelessly juvenile mother (Kierston Wareing), Mia lives in a cramped apartment with her younger, spoiled sister (Rebecca Griffiths). She’s toughened, volatile – when she’s not cussing out her mother, she’s head-butting a classmate. Her pent-up frustrations have nowhere else to channel, save for the occasional hip-hop dance routine (routines similar to the ones she criticizes her fellow classmates of practicing).

Mia’s mother brings home a new boyfriend, Connor (Michael Fassbender). A charming security guard, Mia immediately attaches to him as a surrogate father, as a best friend. He gives her the encouragement she’s desperately been seeking. His initial good intentions are misunderstood, however, as Mia becomes rampantly jealous – resenting her mother while spying on Connor making love to her.

Jarvis, a newcomer, is a revelation. Although highly combustible, Jarvis does not lose sight of Mia’s humanity. Behind the violent profanities is a tortured young girl, desperately in need of care. Fassbender, in a role similar to Peter Sarsgaard’s from “An Education”, is every bit as charming of a predator, but meanwhile wrought with shame and humiliation.

One of the biggest joys in “Fish Tank” is that, as a film about teen angst, it doesn’t come off as a series of worst case scenario, exploitative sequences of melodrama. For instance, “Thirteen”, a film I generally like, reduces a teenage girl to a promiscuous, mentally unstable outcast. “Fish Tank”, on the other hand, perfectly captures the confusions and frustrations of a teenager. Mia is every bit as emotionally developed as the adults in the film, however she doesn’t quite have a handle on the consequences of her actions. She’s not condescended to, and “teenager” is not a derogatory term used to define her depression, rather she is, well, living in a fish tank. Suffocated, tied down, seemingly forever immobilized.