Young Adam

PREVIOUSLY: DOWN WITH LOVE

A BAFTA-sweeping erotic (?) crime drama from 2003 that has since been completely forgotten, Young Adam, based on the book of the same name by Alexander Trocchi, is about Joe Taylor (Ewan McGregor,) a drifter working as a hired hand on a family-run barge. After discovering the drowned body of a woman from his past, Joe seduces his boss lady.

To be fair to this movie, I was not in the best headspace while watching it, and also was extremely tired. That said, wow this movie was almost physically painful to sit through. Despite some halfway interesting visuals, it is both depressing and mind-numbingly boring.

I’m honestly not sure I have much else to say about it. I liked the book better, but not too much better. What started as an interesting premise quickly began to wear out its welcome, to the point where I set it down for a while and really struggled to pick it back up. We know, Joe is popular with the ladies. Please move on. At least it was short.

I know I’ve said before that voiceovers in movies tend to annoy me. It makes me feel as if the filmmaker doesn’t trust us to figure out what’s going on and is condescending to us. At one point, Young Adam was going to have a full voiceover, but it was decided against including it in the final release. For this movie, I honestly think that was a mistake.

The most interesting thing about the book is how we’re trapped in Joe’s first-person narration. Reading the way Trocchi as Joe describes bodies and the act of sex was more interesting and more perversely erotic than anything in the film. I can’t believe a movie with this many sex scenes, each competing against the others to see which could be the most passionless and miserable-looking, still stubbornly managed to be so unsexy. Not even the custard/non-consensual (?) spanking scene sparked any reaction in me, good or bad. And for what? What was the point of all this?

I’m also honestly kind of mad over the fact that Ella was repeatedly described as both strong and fat in the book and that Joe was attracted to that, and then they cast Tilda Swinton in a fat woman’s role.

In the book, Joe is a complicated character but ultimately seems kind of like a psychopath. He’s an unreliable narrator. Reading his interpretation of society and the legal system, the way he rationalizes the “accident,” his not turning himself in even though there (allegedly) was no murder and doing the bare possible minimum to prevent an innocent man from hanging in his place, is the other really interesting thing about the book. It was the entire main conflict. The movie replaces this by having Ewan McGregor silently stare into the middle distance as things happen to him and around him.

While I wasn’t particularly a fan of Trocchi’s writing, I did have a sneaking suspicion while reading it that this would be another book heavily reliant on internal narration that would be difficult to adapt into a satisfying film. I was right.

David Byrne composed the soundtrack for this movie. Because Scottish, I guess.

COMING UP NEXT: BIG FISH