Liam [VHS] [2001]

This is an atmospheric and realistic film set in depression era Liverpool, following the woes of a working class family who face unemployment, means-testing and regular trips to the pawn shop. However the main theme is more heart-warming with it's focus on Liam, the youngest boy of the family, as he prepares for First Holy Communion and his first awakenings to the female body. The climax of the film involves a tragedy caused by Liam's father's involvement with the Fascist Blackshirts. Jimmy McGovern's direction ( of Cracker TV fame ) is perhaps a little heavy handed in it's use of stereotypes ( scary dogmatic Catholic priests and harsh employers ) but it is nevertheless a well made and sometimes touching recreation of a troubled time in British history.

This film is well written and well acted all main characters and extras make it so believable its great!

This unremittingly grim film tells the tale of Liam, a small and stammering junior school son of working class parents, whose family lives in the midst of a warren of back-to-back terrace housing in 1930s Liverpool. Liam's father (Ian Hart) is put out of work at the shipyard, and as poverty mounts and hopelessness sets in ever more deeply, his morale cracks (or so it would seem) and in the end he joins Oswald Mosley's fascist blackshirts. Liam's mother (Claire Hackett) has the awful task of holding the family together, and fights a losing battle to make ends meet. Alone among the family members, Liam's sister (Megan Burns) manages to find work as the servant girl of an upper middle class Jewish household.

Much of the film is taken up with Liam's formal education, which takes place in a deeply dismal Catholic junior school. His teacher is an almost unbelievably ignorant religious bigot, who works hand-in-glove with a stout, overpowering and equally blinkered priest. Both are obsessed with the need to stamp out sin, as they see it, at every possible opportunity.

The acting is universally very good. Anne Reid as the breathlessly intense teacher gives a marvellous performance, and Ian Hart does an excellent job in portraying the gradual deterioration of the father's character. The demeanour of the very young Anthony Borrows in the role of Liam himself also deserves much praise. The cinematography is excellent. The mean, gloomy streets and the depressing school are photographed to perfection.

With so much going for it, why then does the film in the end fail to impress? There are two main reasons, I think, and several minor ones. First, the characterization is over-simple and exaggerated, so that the dramatis personae tend to emerge as working-class caricature figures rather than as rounded human beings. Second, and more important, the story fails to develop in a manner that is satisfactory in dramatic terms. The shocking, unexpected climax (details of which I won't disclose) seems contrived and unconvincing, and rather than reaching a conclusion in which the threads of the story are drawn together, the tale stops suddenly and frustratingly in midstream. It's as though someone has shouted "That's it! Time's up!" and the action has halted immediately.

It doesn't help that there are lots of small but niggling questions. Why exactly did the wealthy Jewish family take on a poor and inarticulate working-class Catholic girl at a time when there must have been very many better qualified applicants for the job? Was it really the case that Mosley's fascists did well in working-class Catholic areas of the northern cities? And so on and so forth.

In short, this is a well-meaning and sometimes impressive film but one that is let down by too much stereotyping and by an unconvincing and seriously incomplete story line. Try before you buy.