Ratcatcher

Glasgow, mid-Seventies. A garbagemen's strike afflicts the city. While boys muck around in the diseased water, a drowning occurs, and 12-year-old James Gillespie's life changes forever. From the first moments of this bleak Scottish export, the misery of these people is deeply felt. Children come of age long before their time as families are broken by poverty, drink, death, and grime. Dialogue is spare, but what's there is cutting. The face of James, who is staggeringly played by newcomer William Eadie, is almost always pinched and pained, and it hurts to watch someone so young racked with an incomparable guilt (James was implicated in the accidental drowning). Every instance of tenderness -- in a mother's impromptu dance around the living room, or between two children first learning how to use their bodies like adults -- is returned tenfold by despair. It's a depressing film (though not joyless), and it's difficult to recommend something so agonizing to watch. But writer/director Lynne Ramsay still produces poetry in all this devastation. Ratcatcher is an inner-city tragedy that plays its story simply, sorrowfully, and beautifully.