Workingclass cast adds extra punch
Leads are all British on road trip through lower depths of U. S.
“Jungleland” follows two broke brothers — one a talented bareknuckle boxer, the other his controlling excon “manager” — crosscountry from dreary Fall River, Mass., to the title fight in San Francisco.
They’re certain the contest is going to change their fortunes — if they can make it there, a goal complicated by a local gangster forcing them to deliver a reluctant young woman to a creep in Reno along the way.
The latest movie directed by Max Winkler, “Jungleland” stars Jack O’Connell (“Unbroken”) as fighter “Lion” Kaminski, Charlie Hunnam (“Sons of Anarchy”) as his brother Stanley and Jessica Barden ( the delightful, deadpan depressive from Netflix’s “The End of the F*** ing World”) as their mysterious passenger, Sky. Like the Bruce Springsteen song of the same name, the film is all about workingclass struggles, failure and hope.
The movie is as inspired by gritty films of the 1970s as by the decade’s songs, but Winkler and his cowriters infused the piece with modern perspectives.
“The reason I like those movies is not just because of their aesthetics, but for the authentic emotionality and how people speak to each other,” Winkler told The Chronicle on a conference call from Los Angeles. “Especially the way men talk and relate and show affection towards each other. In a movie like John Huston’s ‘ Fat City’ or Hal Ashby’s ‘ The Last Detail,’ they want to say ‘ I love you,’ but it’s hard based on the expectations we put on masculinity.”
Winkler described his movie as a love story between a couple of different people. Barden knew she would be the only woman in a maelstrom of codependent machismo, but that didn’t daunt the young English actress.
“That is one of the reasons why I wanted to be in the movie,” she said from a different location in L. A. “I knew that these scenes with Jack and Charlie would be very challenging for me to hold my own, as an actress and also my character, with them. The movie explores masculinity, how they protect each other and fight each
other. Yet Sky is a very interesting take on a female. She tries to give as good as she gets all of the time.”
The lead actors are all British on this road trip through America’s lower depths. Like many welltrained Brits, Barden, Hunnam and O’Connell have no problem convincing us their characters are U. S. born and bred. Their experience with Britain’s entrenched class system was actually a plus.
“I just cast the best actors for the parts, people that understood the characters and know the experience of these people setting out for what they think is their piece of the American dream,” said Winkler, who along with his indie films has directed episodes of “New Girl,” “Brooklyn NineNine,” “Crazy ExGirlfriend” and other network shows. “The lifestyle of going from place to place and never really feeling a sense of home is something that every actor can relate to, but especially actors from the workingclass parts of England.”
Barden, who plays a welloff Valley Girl in her next movie, “Pink Skies Ahead” ( and has a few scenes in it with Max’s father, Henry Winkler), found a rare opportunity in “Jungleland” to be more like herself, albeit with an American accent.
“There is this thing where people think English actors are all upper class,” Barden said. “All of us were the correct class to play these roles. That’s very rare; you usually have actors playing down a class, and there really isn’t anything for other actors to do. Hopefully people will put aside the fact that we’re not actually American and focus more on that we three actors really do represent this way of life.”
For the cast and crew, producing “Jungleland” was its own struggle. While most of it was filmed in and around old New England mill towns, getting final exterior shots in Chinatown and near the Golden Gate Bridge felt like winning a prize.
“San Francisco is, like, the ideal,” Winkler said of its symbolism to the whole endeavor. “It’s the city upon the hill. It’s what we were trying to get to as we were slogging through the days in Fall River and Pawtucket ( R. I.) in the Northeast. By the time we finally got to San Francisco,
it really felt like we had actually gone on the journey that the boys had made with Sky.”