From his 1997 debut feature 24/7, right up to the recent This Is England (released on DVD this month), Shane Meadows has demonstrated that he is a young filmmaker of genuine talent. Able to tell stories of marginalised, uncelebrated lives without patronising his characters or resorting to sentimentality, Meadows is, along with Michael Winterbottom, the most exciting of contemporary British directors.
Dead Man’s Shoes is a tale of vengeful return and violent retribution. It builds an ominous mood of tension by way of a deliberately slow pace and a drawn out revelation of key plot details. It has an exceptional central performance and its conclusion is unexpected. So far, so Get Carter.
But to suggest that Shane Meadows’ fourth film is little more than a barely disguised remake of the Mike Hodges 1971 classic would be to do it a disservice. Dead Man’s Shoes is the work of a director who is only too aware of his source material and uses it for inspiration. The film’s unsettling examination of casual cruelty and the essential selfishness of revenge, make it one of the most compelling and original British films of recent years.
Paddy Considine, who co-wrote the screenplay with Meadows, is outstanding as Richard, an intense, quietly-spoken squaddie right out of the Travis Bickle school of unusual loners. Richard returns with his younger brother Anthony, who has learning difficulties, to an unnamed town in the Midlands which they left eight years earlier. There he finds that the same gang of cheap minor thugs and lazy grunt drug dealers are still running things. This is far from Guy Ritchie territory – there is no stylised, comic book glamour here, no wide boy faux-gangster cheeky boy chappyness, no one-liners crafted especially for the soundtrack CD. Meadows’ gangland is memorable for its prosaic lack of cool.
Richard soon disturbs the gang’s safe little world. We learn of the reason for his intense need to get even in a series of black and white flashbacks which, interspersed with the present narrative, eventually build to a horrifying and revelatory denouement.
Despite a positive critical reception, Dead Man’s Shoes was all but completely ignored at the box office upon its release in 2004. It has since gone on to do quite well on DVD and deserves to have the widest audience.
Watch it for Paddy Considine. Watch it for its explosive refusal to conform to expectations. Watch it because Shane Meadows offers a refreshing alternative to Richard Curtis’ stories of true-love obsessed toffs. It’s good to be reminded that Britain is not all garden parties, canapés and bumbling cads.
Editor’s note: See a short film about Shane Meadows’s latest film This is England, which is available on DVD this month, from myspace: