Submarine
(2 of 2)
Ayoade is fitfully attentive to the unerring marksmanship of teen cruelty. Early in the film, to keep his classmates from torturing him, and to be near Jordana, Oliver joins a bullying party whose victim is the heavyset Zoe (Lily McCann). She is humiliated, blames Oliver and leaves school; but his remorse is trumped by having passed Jordana's hazing test. As his voice-over narration tells us, "I mustn't let my principles stand in the way of progress." A coming-of-age drama in the Hollywood humanist style would ordain that Oliver eventually throw over Jordana to apologize to and reconcile with Zoe (who's hefty but also pretty). Not here; for there's a bit of Oliver that is a budding Joe Lampton, the ambitious schemer played by Laurence Harvey in the 1959 Brit semi-classic Room at the Top. (In the Dunthorne book, Oliver thinks he can ease Jordana's depression over her mother's illness if instead she were to mourn for her beloved pet — so he kills the dog. That poochicide is missing from the film.)
As faithful as he is, in his fashion, to the novel, Ayoade knows he's making a movie, and so turns Submarine into a compendium of coming-of-age films. "Sometimes I wish there were a camera crew following my every move," Oliver says, and Ayoade treats the viewer to the boy's own imagined super-8 masterpiece, an Jordanaian idyll called Two Weeks of Love. (Are you listening, J.J. Abrams?) Oliver imagines that one fantasy interlude would end with a sweeping tracking shot, then realizes his movie could afford only a zoom shot. Ayoade's camera obligingly zooms in.
By craftily lodging the film in no particular decade (the book is set in the 1980s), Ayoade can riffle any number of teen-movie archetypes. His hero could be called a Welsh median between John Hughes' anguished midwesterners and François Truffaut's comically solemn Antoine Doinel. Oliver also has a poster of 60s French heartthrob Alain Delon hanging in his bedroom. But with Oliver's Beatles bowl haircut and several side trips into fanciful music videos, the movie in its more larkish moments references Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night from 1964 and the director's next film, the Zeitgeisty romantic comedy The Knack...and How to Get It. Those are two excellent models, from which Ayoade draws well and selectively.
In this Lester light, Oliver could be the young John Lennon, and Jordana the cheeky Rita Tushingham from The Knack. With or without cinematic predecessors, Roberts (who also looks like a teen James McAvoy) and Paige (star of the Doctor Who BBC spinoff The Sarah Jane Adventures) slip sinuously into their roles. For all we know, they are whom they play: the love-struck obsessive and his imperious seductress. The adult actors are also fine, though the film forfeits a smidge of its charm and propulsive force once Oliver struggles to become his family's savior.
Most of the rest is pure, awkward bliss. Anyone who has been a teenager, or secretly still is, will find deft self-portraiture when taking a ride on this flagitiously funny Submarine.