Following the release of A Field in England, Brogan Morris believes director Ben Wheatley has already established himself as a unique filmmaker, and an auteur for the future…
So, Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England screened on Film4 on Friday night (and saw simultaneous release on DVD, VOD and in cinemas the same day, officially making 5th July A Field in England Day). It was predictably horrifying, weird, blackly comic and damn unsettling, and featured a wonderful turn from The League of Gentleman’s Reece Shearsmith as a snivelling deserter and bookworm. Twitter lit up in bewilderment, those new to Wheatley’s work having tuned into the culmination of Film4’s Ben Wheatley season only to find something abstruse yet oddly bewitching. In short, they were met with a typical Ben Wheatley film.
Critics have, for the most part, been kind to Ben Wheatley (Little White Lies’ David Jenkins expressed his disappointment at A Field in England, though he also compared Wheatley with British masters Roeg and Boorman). Robbie Collin, in his Telegraph review of A Field in England, even went out on a limb and described Wheatley as “Britain’s most thrilling young director.”
Still, some remain hesitant to class Wheatley along with other modern Brit greats as yet. “What a unique film-maker Wheatley is becoming,” wrote Peter Bradshaw in his Guardian review of A Field in England. But why is Wheatley – four films in – still thought of as only becoming any kind of filmmaker? Would critics have dared say “what a unique film-maker Terrence Malick is becoming” after The New World, his fourth film?
While Film4 on the surface of things took into its own hands the effort to transform the perception of Wheatley into one of an auteur, it’s likely that the channel’s ‘Ben Wheatley season’ was really just an attempt to hype A Field in England’s televised premiere. The Ben Wheatley season was most probably a marketing decision made by an oft-confused station (on what other movie channel would you find Independence Day followed by Giorgios Lanthimos’s Haneke-esque psycho-thriller Dogtooth?) unsure of how to promote the obscure indie horror on its books. It seems strange to mark out such a director as one befitting of a ‘season,’ a retrospective after only five years and four films, but – even if the positioning of Wheatley as auteur was merely a marketing ploy – Film4 was absolutely right in doing so.
During the last decade, some fine independent British filmmakers came to prominence. Right at the end emerged Ben Wheatley, quietly, but he’s perhaps remained the most consistently exciting since. Where Shane Meadows has spent the last few years on television wearing out the This Is England brand, Andrea Arnold has gone to ground since her (admirable) 2011 misfire Wuthering Heights and Lynne Ramsay is currently residing in Hollywood jail following the Jane Got A Gun affair, the most promising director of UK indies at this moment could well be Wheatley, the man that started off in grand, mischievous fashion in 2009 (with Down Terrace) and hasn’t faltered since. And yet the volume of praise for Wheatley within critics’ circles has arguably been far quieter than for any of the aforementioned.
Maybe it’s because of the speed of Wheatley’s ascent, because the dust is yet to settle – the regularity of Wheatley’s output (Kill List in 2011, Sightseers in 2012, and now A Field in 2013) has hardly given critics enough time to dissect his work. Sure, Wheatley has almost as many films to his name as Malick, but Malick’s 20-year disappearing act post-Days of Heaven gave cineastes the time to scrutinise every impeccable, painterly frame until they could declare that, after only two films, Malick was indeed worthy of the title ‘auteur’. Critics might need time to take stock, to analyse and over-analyse until it’s finally decided that, yes, Wheatley is another man of unique style, deserving of the reverence afforded to Meadows, Arnold and Ramsay.
It can’t help, either, that Wheatley works exclusively in a genre that is for many critics the basest of them all. Though his work is punctured by touches of black comedy and surrealism, Wheatley is a horror director through and through. And horror is a speciality genre, its filmmakers always cinema’s last genre directors to garner any critical respect. It’s not hard to see why: when most horror movies rely on jump-scare tactics or exaggerated gore to lure adrenaline junkies in for cheap thrills, it’s difficult to see the Kill Lists for all the Last Exorcisms, Saws and Final Destinations. It’s a genre sullied by lesser filmmakers that wouldn’t know true horror if it appeared before them holding hands in a Kubrickian hotel hallway. In the minds of many critics, Ben Wheatley works in the pulpiest, least consequential movie genre there is.
Whatever the case, Ben Wheatley remains well-liked if not universally loved. Critics tend to attract like flies around a lightbulb for big, weighty, possibly European, occasionally American (independent, obviously) projects; they don’t so easily jump on improvisational comedies about Brummie serial killers visiting tram museums. Wheatley’s visual style hasn’t progressed much since Down Terrace, either – it remains lo-fi, and perhaps Wheatley’s refusal so far to ‘mature’ aesthetically is one reason certain critics regard him as someone only ‘becoming’ a filmmaker.
But Ben Wheatley is already most definitely an auteur, up there with the finest of world cinema right now. As retroactive criticism of the likes of Samuel Fuller or Dario Argento has proven, directors of pulp material can be the types to endure well beyond the more respectable filmmakers of their period. The style of the likes of Fuller may have been brash, but his ideas, his images, and especially the feelings his work induced, were potent. They lasted, and now he’s recognised as a trailblazer. Directors that aspire to thrill don’t always get their due at the time of release – for a time, Hitchcock’s films were thought of as mere trifles. Wheatley belongs in similar categories, and his filmic personality is likewise strong.
Kim Newman, for Sight & Sound, penned a lengthy article on A Field in England’s influences and forebears, suggesting that it’s essentially just a conflation of other films. It’s telling that so many critics have listed A Field in England’s influences over how the film reflects Wheatley’s own directorial stamp; The Playlist’s Jessica Kiang, for instance, likened the film to a “rapidly shot mashup of the melancholic aesthetic of Ingmar Bergman, the comedic sensibility of Mel Brooks and the tonal uneasiness of Lars Von Trier”. Of course, comparisons like this suggest that the film is not totally the work of the author, or at least downplays what elements of the film belong to the director (what critic would deconstruct the new Scorsese picture in the same way, and argue that the film is anyone’s but his own?).
Often you’ll find filmmakers testing the waters over their first few movies, until their focus settles on certain themes, certain motifs. Spielberg was arguably still channelling Hitchcock before he made the decidedly Spielbergian Close Encounters, beginning a career obsessed with the broken family unit and child’s-eye wonder. And Scorsese wasn’t really Scorsese until Mean Streets, his previous films – Who’s That Knocking at My Door? and Boxcar Bertha – hardly indicative of what kind of director he was, or rather what kind of director he’d become. It makes little sense that Ben Wheatley is treated as a novice drawing on the examples of others when his own traits and trademarks were already obvious in Down Terrace, with Kill List and Sightseers to corroborate the evidence. And closer inspection shows that A Field in England is a Wheatley film like any other.
On a broad level, bursts of violent black comedy and scenes of horror permeate banal domesticity in Wheatley’s films, with an ominous dread constantly lingering over at-first ordinary proceedings. There’s a pang of gothica to all his work, sitting (intentionally) uneasily alongside gritty docu-realism. From Down Terrace onwards, this hasn’t changed, nor has the naturalism in both camera and performance, with mise-en-scene and mise-en-shot complementing one another in their vérité style.
Of course the consequences of murder is another key feature. But there’s also a strong sense of English heritage in all of Wheatley’s first three pictures, with an emphasis on ingrained history (the old folk songs in Down Terrace, the pagan influence in Kill List, the ancient country backdrops of Sightseers), which is why it actually makes sense that Wheatley embarked on a Civil War adventure with A Field in England. His films are deeply British, specifically rooted in a kind of Cromwellian time period of casual brutality and superstition. Wheatley’s movies are uneasy in a ruthless suburbia and more at home in an earthy English countryside – again, making the entirely open-air A Field more of an inevitability than it may have seemed on first inspection.
Going even deeper, mysticism has been intrinsic to all of Wheatley’s features. This reaches its apotheosis in A Field in England, but it’s there in the very fabric of Kill List, that film’s dream-like atmosphere wordlessly questioning the very nature of reality. It’s there even in the gritty Down Terrace, an everyday conversation between small-time gangster Bill and his son Karl turning to the topic of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. And starting with Bill and Karl, almost all of Wheatley’s male protagonists have been volatile, stubborn and quite often psychopathic man-children, while solitary female characters are – unbeknownst to foolish husbands and boyfriends – borderline Lady Macbeth style puppetmasters.
It’s that kind of uniqueness that makes an auteur, and it’s never too early to recognise a filmmaker as one. Though critics will often tend to dismiss certain ‘bad’ filmmakers as mere hacks, even some terrible directors could be considered auteurs (auteurism should alone be defined by whether the personal vision of the director shines through, not by the quality of their films – even Michael Bay has defining characteristics). But for those critics that hold the erroneous notion that auteurism has foundations in quality – subjective as ‘quality’ is – the quality has always been there with Wheatley, too. Down Terrace, despite its miniscule budget, arrived fully-formed, not undermined by its own financial shortcomings. Then Kill List (Wheatley’s most intense, thought-provoking and best work to date), Sightseers and now A Field in England proved even better.
There are some filmmakers that are like catnip to critics. Ben Wheatley isn’t comfortably one of them. You can’t claim that Wheatley isn’t getting his fair share of attention right now – the buzz around A Field in England is the best Wheatley has got in his entire career. But Wheatley’s a purveyor of pulp, a melder of the extreme and the arthouse, whose films awkwardly remain somewhere between entertaining the audience and pleasing the critics. Wheatley’s another Samuel Fuller. He’s an auteur for the future, to be liked yet perhaps fundamentally misunderstood now, and loved in years to come. Ben Wheatley is already a ‘unique filmmaker,’ and he is on a par with Boorman and Roeg. Critics shouldn’t be afraid to classify him as such, no matter how early it is in his career.
Brogan Morris – Lover of film, writer of words, pretentious beyond belief. Thinks Scorsese and Kubrick are the kings of cinema, but PT Anderson and David Fincher are the young princes. Follow Brogan on Twitter if you can take shameless self-promotion.
