Cillian Murphy, producer and star, has rejoined Tim Mielants, kinetic director, for a follow-up to their celebrated Irish drama Small Things Like These. Sadly, the chemistry does not quite spark this time.
Based on Max Porter’s novel Shy, Steve brings us to a school for troubled students in a leafy corner of England. Murphy is the eponymous teacher. Tracey Ullman is a senior colleague. The agitated camera, running when it need only trot, becomes a character in itself.
This is undoubtedly a work of some integrity. The film-makers care about how society deals with young men on the brink of social exclusion. One can sense the older actors straining to convey the inner confliction within the staff. They cannot do enough, but they must do what they can.
For all that, Steve feels fatally stranded between the hard edge of Alan Clarke’s Scum – initially a gruelling 1977 TV play – and the sentimentality of “inspirational teacher” dramas such as Sidney Poitier in To Sir, With Love. A hurried closing act ultimately leans more towards the latter than the former.
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You could not accuse the screenplay of failing to stuff the screen with incident. We are some way into the story before it is revealed that the authorities, unconvinced taxpayers’ money is well spent, are planning to close the facility and send the students to the winds.
Steve is set in 1996, one year before Tony Blair ended 17 years of Tory rule. In a turn that is, sadly, not untypical of an often broad film, Roger Allam pops up as an absurdly pompous MP called Sir Hugh Montague Powell (pronounced “Pole ... like Anthony Powell”) to say all the wrong things and get shouted at. Papier-mache effigies at protest marches have been more subtly constructed. All this as a news crew attempts to film a report on the institution.
Steve, a furrowed man recovering from his own traumas, finds himself flailing to place a metaphorical sticking plaster on metaphorical head wounds. One young man looks to be contemplating suicide. Others are sinking into themselves. The enervated film-making never pauses in its insistence on an only partially explained urgency.
No doubt the film is, to an extent, ramshackle on purpose. A few US reviews have already compared the hurtling camera and overlapping dialogue to those in the TV series The Bear. Both are communicating the challenge of too few people trying to solve too many, constantly mutating problems. But here the film’s attention is so divided we get little chance to connect with characters who, despite consistently strong performances, come across as mere sketches.
It feels telling that, late in the film, Steve is given a speech that explicitly outlines what he admires and what frustrates him about each of the students. This will come as new information to many viewers.
Still, committed efforts from consummate professionals hold attention over an oddly terse – in the sense that much seems to be missing – running time. Murphy’s congenital charisma is useful in conveying how, amid all the dangerous chaos, this intense fellow might make a special connection with constantly distracted students. A reminder we are in the olden days comes as he discusses dance-music preferences with a young man addicted to beats on his personal stereo.
Murphy’s performance feels like a well-worked vessel that remains unsatisfactorily filled throughout. Steve is almost always on screen, but he never seems more than one or other stock type: the caring teacher, the firebrand, the white-knuckle recovering addict.
For all the bustle, flow and noise, there is little here we haven’t seen before.
In cinemas from Friday, September 19th
