Waterland

(Stephen Gyllenhaal, UK, 1992)

This one of the many literary films of the early '90s where key dramatic metaphors are leadenly spelt out: "Everything gets caught in the drain trap and resurfaces – like in memory!"

It is also a memory-film, in which the primal traumas of the teen years – complicity in murder, transgressive sex, abortion – completely determine all future adult life. The present is only the depressed "catchment" where these primal scenes create havoc, until they are resolved (in an intriguing Happy Ending marked as rare and a bit wishful: "Tell me when you find one.").

The film uses a very clumsy device: the school class literally walking around in the past ("Don't get lost, now!"). And it deploys another device, this one sentimental in the Dead Poets Society (1989) vein: the bonding between Tom (Jeremy Irons) and the young, recalcitrant rebel, Matthew (Ethan Hawke) – leading to Tom's final address to the school assembly rather absurdly being addressed solely to Matthew at one point!

The film has a Channel 4-style modern-didactic slant: at the "end of history", one must work to integrate one's personal story into the great story of world history; one must tell and re-tell this tale in the present, to forge meaning ... Strangely enough, the film raises – but does not show – the key political event (the witnessing of Holocaust corpses) that gives rise to the hero's wisdom on this point.

Instead, it's really only the trauma of personal/sexual history which is at stake here: there is some curious material dealing with incest, the retarded son, and so on.

Irons is very good and soulful in this part; it's one of his better roles of the '90s.

© Adrian Martin March 1994