Catcher in the mire

Ratcatcher finds the diamonds in the rough

by Peter Keough

If the title doesn't draw you in, the setting -- the slums of Glasgow during the 1970s garbage strike and under the unmentioned tyranny of Margaret Thatcher -- probably won't either. Nonetheless, Scottish director Lynne Ramsay's Ratcatcher discerns a lyrical song of innocence and experience in the midst of the squalor, the misery, and the thick accents. Finding beauty in bad teeth and bad wallpaper, in refuse, drunkenness, ignorance, brutality, and despair can be a daunting task, but Ramsay, who draws from autobiographical experience for her feature debut, combines the tough-mindedness of Ken Loach with some of the whimsy of Bill Forsyth. Ratcatcher won't leave you cheering like Billy Elliot or The Full Monty; it may instead leave you scratching and looking forward to a shower. But the emotions it inspires are deeper, more ambiguous, and more enduring.

Things start out grim for 12-year-old James Gillespie (William Eadie, who combines a scamp's charm with a martyr's serenity): roughhousing near a local stagnant canal, he accidentally-on-purpose drowns his best friend. There are no witnesses, and he bears his guilt silently, even when the boy's bereaved mother insists he take the ill-fitting shoes she just bought for her son. His guilt is one more item buried in the pile of woes that accumulate about his life and that of his family and neighbors like the uncollected trash clotting their yards and roadways.

James's Da (Tommy Flanagan) is a genial drunk of the Angela's Ashes school, irresponsible, mawkish, unsightly. Ma (Mandy Matthews) rebuffs Da's drink-induced attentions and ignores his flirtations with the occasional barfly but nags him about getting new flat from the housing council. Younger sister Anne Marie (Lynne Ramsay Jr.) is a snitch with a Tom Jones jones; older sister Ellen (Michelle Stewart) sneers at James and sneaks off to take a double-decker to an unknown rendezvous. His only other friend is half-cracked Kenny, whose Glaswegian accent is muddled by a speech impediment and who has an obsession about the wee animals his mother buys him.

It's not enough to keep James occupied, and he decides to take that same double-decker to the end of the line, where he finds an abandoned construction site in the middle of nowhere. Adopting one of the half-finished houses as his own, he savors the view out of a paneless picture window of an endless field of waving grass -- it looks like Wyeth's Christina's World without Christina.

The scene of his crime beckons, though, the death canal that seems the ultimate conduit of this scabrous hell. That's where he meets Margaret Anne (Leanne Mullen), the 14-year-old neighborhood slut, as she stolidly endures her daily torments from the neighborhood gang of teenage toughs who've tired of chasing down and killing the rats that breed in the mounting ordure. This time Margaret Anne gets off easy -- they toss her glasses into the drink instead of gang-raping her -- and, touched by James's innocence, she lets him touch the scab on her knee.

That's romance for you. At least it's a start, and tenderness, comedy, and glimpses of the sublime on occasion emerge from the sewer. In addition to giving James a nasty case of head lice, Margaret Anne introduces him to a dumbstruck love; this leads to a chaste bath scene that is at once touching, sad, sexy, and scary in a way that's bound to anger some people. Poor Da, too, has his redeeming moments; hung over and in his underwear, he rescues hapless Kenny from the canal and is proclaimed a hero. And vermin -- whether rats or mice or misfits -- prove to be the secret, long-suffering conscience of a rotting society.

Not exactly an original idea, perhaps, but Ratcatcher avoids stereotype and sentiment; when Da tries to convince little Anne Marie that the mouse he flushed down the toilet is now basking at the seashore, she tells him it's dead. With its blithe mix of tones, its unpretentious acting, and its underlying compassion and sense of wonder, the film uncovers the humanity beneath the crusty surface and the workings of fate beneath the meanderings of passion and pain. Like the rodent tied to a balloon and set aloft in one of its few magical scenes, Ratcatcher ends up in the most unexpected places.