Wesley Fenlon | Not with a bang but a whimper.

I think there’s a piece of me missing.  I didn’t know I was missing it until about three months ago when I first saw An Education.  The film was up for three Academy Awards.  And not throwaway awards, like sound editing or hairstyling.  We’re talking real awards: Best Picture and Best Actress.

I spent a couple hours watching An Education, and afterward I started to think something wasn’t quite right with me.  And ever since, that same niggling uncertainty will pop back up and gnaw at my confidence.  But today I found out for sure.  I watched Fish Tank.

Apparently 2009 was the year for depressing British adolescent flicks.  Or maybe those are the only kinds of movies British people make outside of the Bond franchise, and the two I’ve been exposed to are but the tip of a horrifyingly vast iceberg of teenage angst.  I really don’t want to know, because An Education and Fish Tank were enough to prove something to me.  Despite critical acclaim, despite passionate writing and emotional acting, despite powerful cinematography, I just can’t seem to care about young British girls and their experiences with older men.

Whatever part of my brain dishes out sympathy, it’s missing the receptor for the plight of the British youth.  After watching both of those movies, devoting four hours of my life to them, trying to appreciate them as the movie buff I aspire to be…mostly, I was just bored.

Don’t get me wrong — there’s a lot in each film I can appreciate.  An Eduation captures its setting beautifully, applying this glossy sheen of wonder to the high society of 1960s Europe.  It’s like a perfectly-resored antique, and an absolute pleasure to look at.  I just couldn’t draw much of an emotional impact out of the story.  The problem sure wasn’t the acting; Carey Mulligan’s Oscar nomination was well-deserved, and Peter Sarsgaard exuded Child Fucker from the moment he showed up on screen (and seriously that Minnie/Bubbalub scene is one of the creepiest things I’ve ever seen).

Maybe that was the problem, actually.  When your movie is about a young girl falling for a dashing older guy who woos her with his charm and offers her the world, is there ever any doubt how things will turn out?  Watching An Education amounts to spending two hours waiting for something awful to happen, and then it does happen, and then people get over it and life goes on.  The story is told well, but it was destined to end the way it did from the very beginning, and didn’t bother to take any detours along the way.  It was a straight line from start to finish, and my sympathy didn’t make it far past the starting line.

Then there’s Fish Tank, which took an altogether different approach to the same coming of age dilemma.  An Education seemed to show us that life is pretty amazing, as long as you don’t get tricked by charming child predators.  Fish Tank’s motif is more along the lines of Life Is A Bit Shit, and nobody is really ever happy about anything.  The protagonist, Mia, and her ghastly mother try to out-horrible each other because they’re both pretty miserable.  The mother is the party type, still trying to have a good time and acting like she doesn’t have kids to be responsible for.  And Mia has so much rage and angst built up she just hates everbody, and has to tell them at every available opportunity.

The whole thing is recorded with handheld cameras, and the style works perfectly to capture the low-class urban social system at work, high-rise tenements and cramped spaces.  Mia spends most of her time wandering aimlessly or dancing.  And her dancing is complimented several times throughout the film, though it mostly seemed awful to me.  But if there’s anything I’m less fit to analyze than the emotional state of a 16 year old lower-class British girl, it’s probably dancing.

The worst thing about Fish Tank is that the only character who is remotely appealing is mom’s boyfriend Connor, who, of course, turns out to be a double-life leading sleaze.  The depiction of Mia’s life is raw and just terrible enough to feel authentic, but is also borderline uncomfortable to watch.

When I think back on coming of age stories, there are plenty that resonate with me.  Quite a few of my all-time favorites are coming of age tales, in fact.  But all of them are a little more nuanced, complicated, or masked than either An Education or Fish Tank.  Take FLCL, for example, which buries a very sweet growing up story underneath layers of Japanese pop-culture references, robot fights, and a level of weirdness only Japan can cram into a couple hours of television.  Or Ferris Bueller, which begins as a story about a lovable slacker and ends as a much more poignant story about Cameron, and what happens to love and friendship after high school.

Fish Tank and An Education simply didn’t resonate with me that way.  Much as I tried, I couldn’t generate the sympathy to feel much for the girls, as horrible as their situations were.  Maybe it’s because the prospect of having my life ruined by a charming-but-ultimately-evil 30 year old man is utterly foreign to me.  But I found Joyce Carol Oates’ novel You Must Remember This to be far more gripping and emotionally powerful than either film, even though it told much the same story.  The power of prose over film, I guess.  Or it could’ve just been the accents.