Filth (R). Director: Jon S. Baird. Starring: James McAvoy, Shauna Macdonald, Joanne Froggatt. 97 minutes
The Breaking Bad episode titled 'The Fly' offers a perfectly timed insight into the residual humanity of a man on the way to becoming a monster. Chemistry teacher Walter White (Bryan Cranston) was intitially prompted to enter the drug trade as a way to raise enough quick cash to support his family, following a bleak prognosis for lung cancer. Since then, greed, pride and circumstance have led him well down the path of corruption. In this famous episode an emotionally, mentally and morally strained Walter laments that he has missed 'the perfect moment' where he might have achieved his financial aims without straying so seemingly far from the reach of redemption.
Director Jon S. Baird's adaptation of Scottish author Irvine Welsh's 1998 novel Filth features an antihero who is similarly well beyond his own 'perfect moment'. Police detective Bruce Robertson (McAvoy) is corrupt, violent, misogynistic, and a drug addict, who for the most part lacks respect or empathy for those around him. He is not entirely inhuman, and the film, a rambunctious and graphic black comedy that is more or less a straight-up character study, spends much frenetic energy trying to map the ghastly inner wounds that bleed greenly into his outer corruption. But he is unerringly cruel, as destructive to those around him as he is to himself.
Baird has his work cut out for him. To be fair, Filth's 97-minute running time doesn't allow him the luxury of the extended series arcs of Breaking Bad and its ilk, to build sympathy for his unpalatable antihero. All he can do is hurl the messy pieces against his cinematic canvas and hope they stick in such a way that by the time the credits roll they have formed a cogent, if ugly portrait. That being said, just how do you build sympathy for a character whose near-to-first on-screen act is to sexually assault and cruelly denigrate the underaged girlfriend of a murder suspect? The answer is: slowly, and not all that convincingly.
In addition to investigating the racially motivated beating-death of a Japanese student, Robertson is trying to manipulate his way into a promotion, by impishly playing his colleagues off against each other, in often depraved fashion. The pressure of his Machiavellian games is getting to him though, and a few cracks are starting to appear in his brutal bravado. Infrequently,