Treacle Jr – review

Tramping around ... Aiden Gillen And Tom Fisher.Treacle JrProduction year: 2010Country: UKCert (UK): 15Runtime: 82 minsDirectors: Jamie ThravesCast: Aidan Gillen, Riann Steele, Tom FisherMore on this film

Jamie Thraves is a British film-maker whose 2000 debut, The Low Down, was a very likable movie and he has been too long absent from the screen. Treacle Jr is a low-key, low-budget portrait of the dispossessed in south-east London, with a teaspoon of Loach, a couple of teaspoons of Beckett and a very big, studied performance from Aidan Gillen to which, I must admit, I took a little time to acclimatise. Gillen plays Aidan, a sweet-natured Irish guy who wanders the streets doing odd jobs door-to-door and cheerfully talking very loudly, very rapidly, and sometimes unintelligibly to total strangers – he appears to have borderline learning difficulties. With a sublime indifference to how unwanted his attentions are, Aidan befriends Tom (Tom Fisher), a man who, in the midst of a personal crisis, has walked out on his wife and child in their comfortable home and is now apparently settling down to a new career of sleeping rough. They are the oddest of odd couples, though a friendship of sorts develops. The film is acted a bit broadly sometimes, and its ending is a little neat, but it reminded me of a phrase Martin Amis coined years ago: "tramp dread", a morbid terror of homeless people which is in fact a terror of how easy and even attractive it might be to give up work and responsibilities and become a tramp oneself. Gillen gives a, loose-limbed comic performance, often funny, sometimes very sad.

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