Film Reviews

Treacle Jr

• Rating:
• Director: Jamie Thraves
• Starring: Aidan Gillen
• Details: UK / 82mins (15A).

Aidan Gillen's stock has been slowly rising these past few years - a turn in the acclaimed series The Wire certainly didn't hurt his portfolio - but this little British movie boasts his strongest performance to date.
Tom (Fisher) leaves his plush suburban home, his wife and baby and makes for the centre of London. He sleeps rough that night and wakes up the next day to toss his iPhone into a pond and his credit cards into a bin. Wandering the streets, he bumps into the happy-go-lucky motormouth Aidan (Gillen), an Irish man with learning difficulties. Aidan lives with a woman (Steele), with whom he has a platonic relationship with, but who regularly beats him. The only solace Aidan has is his dream of buying a drum kit and taking care of his eponymously named kitten.
A thoroughly likeable film, Jamie Thraves (probably best known for directing Blur's Charmless Man and Radiohead's Just videos) guides the audience into this little world to explore human relationships. There's an easy-going nature to the proceedings that's hard to deny. The plot isn't exactly incident packed but Gillen's Aidan is such an agreeable character, he keeps the pot boiling throughout Treacle Jr.'s quieter moments, of which there are quite a few. Like Forrest Gump on Smarties, Aidan refuses to let the world keep him down: even if he's on the receiving end of a mugging or a severe kicking in a back alley, Aidan keeps his perpetual smile.
With the story set in a city the size of London, Thraves works hard to find ways to bring these two ne'er do wells together. Some situations work (Tom loses his money and returns to Aidan's flat to borrow some) - and some don't (Tom happens to be in the same coffee shop as Aidan). One wishes too that Thraves would explore Tom's reasons for leaving his family a little more; in his determination to keep everything as low-key as possible, the main character's motivation, or reasons for the lack of, has to be highlighted more.

Review by Gavin Burke