Review of This Is England (2007) by Chads. — 11 Jan 2008

"This is England" is the best period-piece film about the relatively recent past since Richard Linklater's "Dazed and Confused". From the actors with speaking parts, down to the extras that fill out the screen, in unison, capture the milieu of a small population locked together by a generational happenstance.

The boys and girls don't look like fashion victims. They look like the young people you see in documentary films about the post-punk era. You instantly know what band or solo artist each girl or boy are into.

Shot like a docu-drama, "This is England" also tells a story that's as no-nonsense as its visual style; a story well-told about how an indoctrination begets the racist lifestyle a person undertakes, because we're all born innocent, blank slates susceptible to rhetoric, both, the good and bad sort.

Shaun(Thomas Turgoose) is a lonely kid. Combo(Stephen Graham), too, we realize, in spite of his advanced age. Shaun's mentor is still very impressionable, just like anybody who feels marginalized.

He's a walking and talking contradiction. Graham makes Combo a fascinating character study because he's not completely irredeemable. There's a vestige of that lonely kid somewhere beneath the faux-confident exterior that hatred instilled him with.

"This is England" steers clear away from the wrongheaded notion that racial violence is mindless. There's always some deep-rooted psychological factor behind every hate crime. Combo got to Shaun.

And somebody got to Combo. "This is England" is the best British film I've seen of recent vintage that wasn't directed by Mike Leigh(you know who he is), or Lynne Ramsay("Ratcatcher", "Morvern Callar").