Red Road (2007) does not lend itself to a plot summary because for the first half of the movie you have no idea what is going on. It is an inductive movie which builds slowly to a fascinating and complex ending. At first we see Jackie (Kate Dickie) on her surveillance job of watching people on the streets of Glasgow. Banks of monitors flicker. She goes home, lonely. Monitors flicker. She has boring, routine sex with a co-worker. She goes home. She attends a wedding and for some reason is uncomfortable with the people there. On her monitor a guy goes out behind a crappy building near a housing project, and she is startled to think she recognizes him. Someone says a sentence about him having been in jail for nearly six years. She goes home and pulls out a news paper with his picture on the front. She starts following him by camera even when he drives out of her surveillance district. Later, in her off time, she starts following him on foot. Meanwhile, she has frosty relations with an elderly man who could be her father but is actually her former father-in-law. Later in the movie he says something about “saying good-bye to them properly.”
By this time, I was riveted, but I would understand perfectly if a lot of people were bored. Someone walked into the television room and asked what was going on, and I said, “This woman is tracking this guy—he probably killed her husband and daughter—and she wants to catch him doing something illegal so she can get him put away again.” Little did I know but I had guessed about half the plot correctly. The other half turned out to be more complex and interesting than I could imagine. But I cannot discuss that because in an inductive movie, the conclusion is the payoff for wading through sometimes dreary and confusing detail.
Because an inductive movie does not tell you the story at the start, it must hold your interest while you try to sort through details and build a plot. Red Road is fairly or reasonably or partly successful at doing this. First, the huge monitoring system is interesting, giving the film a futuristic feel—yet the film also feels like a nitty-gritty look at present-day working class Glasgow. Second, Katie Dickie does a great acting job as the protagonist. It is not that she has to play such a huge range of emotions but rather that she has to make a stoical exterior visage reflect a cauldron of well-hidden torment. This is one unhappy woman, yet she never asks for out sympathy, never blubbers, never explains herself, just goes about her business, whatever that is. While some viewers might find this alienating, I thought it was realistic and made her an interesting character. Third, even though we don’t know what is going on, we know that this woman is tracking and even introducing herself to a man who is probably a dangerous criminal. She goes so far as to crash one of his apartment parties. But at the same time the suspense is building, we slowly realize that all the time we’ve had this guy under surveillance he’s done things like have sex, drive his truck around, eat a meal and flirt with the waitress, throw a party, refuse to lend someone a few dollars, and break up a fight in the pub—not the stuff of fierce killers. And then things start to become clearer. Fourth and finally, I admired the audacity of having so little happen, of dropping tiny clues, of assuming the viewer was smart enough to piece together one sentence here and one image there and start to figure out the story.
posted on Sunday, December 16, 2007 3:12 AM by JimBell