Treacle Jr – review

It's a hard knock life: Tom Fisher and Aidan Gillan in Treacle Jr.Treacle JrProduction year: 2010Country: UKCert (UK): 15Runtime: 82 minsDirectors: Jamie ThravesCast: Aidan Gillen, Riann Steele, Tom FisherMore on this film

There must be a children's joke that goes: Q. "How do you approach a film called Treacle?" A. "Syruptitiously." Anyway this low-budget British movie centres on the brief odd-couple relationship between a middle-class dropout who leaves his wife and young child in a Birmingham suburb and lights out to live rough in south London, where he takes up with a manic, motor-mouthed, mentally disturbed Irish tramp. The latter lives with an abusive, promiscuous, exploitative black girl and scrapes a living by, among other things, attempting to hire out his cat Treacle to kill mice in greasy-spoon cafes. The film has its moments and Aidan Gillen is impressive as the Hibernian hanger-on from hell, but it's a slight affair. Back in 2000, Gillen starred in Thraves's highly promising The Low Down, a portrait of the drifting, directionless lives of a group of young people, once art school contemporaries, in north London. It too had an authentic feel to it, as I recall.

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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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