Submarine comes with a lot of critical kudos, particularly for its director, Richard Ayoade, best known for playing Moss in “The IT Crowd”, though his best work remains “Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace”, the hilarious though short-lived spoof ‘80s horror series which he starred in, co-wrote and directed. Submarine sees his first venture into filmmaking, though it is equally packed with allusions, particularly to the French New Wave and the films of Wes Anderson.
Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) is one of those odd teenagers, who reads the dictionary, uses a briefcase instead of a schoolbag and imagines a documentary film crew is following him around, watching his every move. The film essentially follows Oliver through his situation, subjectively with his own voiceover and objectively with a largely distant camera. Oliver gets into a difficult relationship with Jordana (Yasmin Paige), a girl in his class who hates anything emotional, as well as becoming embroiled in the marital strife of his parents Jill and Lloyd (Sally Hawkins and Noah Taylor). He suspects that his mother is having an affair with spiritual guru Graham Purvis (a caricature by Paddy Considine), and takes on the task of saving his parent’s marriage.
The film feels like it should be great, filled with Ayoade’s own brand of idiosyncratic humour and several technical innovations with a distinctive nouvelle vague feel. However, the film is very wet. The numerous references to older films feel like direct quotations, enlisted only to charm nostalgic film critics while Oliver’s own ruminations don’t feel particularly new. As in Wes Anderson’s deeply flawed work, the film starts of whimsical and fun, but it isn’t long before you realize that you don’t like anyone in the film. Oliver is a figure of fun, one who is strange and easy to laugh at but, crucially, not with. As a protagonist, he is very much a dull subject and it isn’t hard to picture his imagined documentary film crew packing up in defeat.
His romance with Yasmin is handled rather lazily with the prerequisite love-hate relationship giving way to something more affecting. However, Ayoade is so clearly trying his hardest to avoid sentimentality, as if having Jordana hate anything romantic makes up for the obviously subjectively fanciful fireworks and Super-8 footage sequences. Ultimately, the film noticeably pulls itself apart, trying too hard to be cynical and knowing when it really wants to just bask in the joys of classic Hollywood romance. The same can be said for the subplot involving Oliver’s parents, scenes which are so stilted and repressed that it becomes extremely hard to care whether his parents ever grow up. Hawkins and Taylor give performances that are so immobile that you wonder whether they aren’t just cardboard cutouts of Angry Mum and Upset Dad. As for Paddy Considine’s role, his Purvis is so over the top that it feels part of a different, less self-conscious, film. The fact that the film avoids anything sentimental so desperately but allows a character so overtly unreal marks the complete ambivalence of Submarine. In the end, one wonders what Ayoade really wanted to achieve with a film too apologetic to be moving and too histrionic to be sincere.
The lasting impression is one of misanthropy. It has been quite a while that a film has presented such a broad range of unlikeable characters, possibly since one of Wes Anderson’s films. It isn’t that the characters are horrible or self-serving; it is simply that they are so devoid of life that you really wonder why you are wasting your time in their company.
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