How i live now
When you’re 16, a social slight can feel like the end of the world, and a summer romance can be equally all consuming. How I Live Now makes the metaphor real, telling the story of an American girl named Daisy who falls for her British cousin (step-cousin, so it’s only step-icky) just as the Third World War breaks out.
Saoirse Ronan plays Daisy, though she prefers to be called Elizabeth, the better to distance herself from her single-parent father. Never seen or even heard from, he has sent her, for reasons unknown, to summer in the English countryside.
She arrives armoured in mascara and sarcasm. Her cousins are a Harry Potter-meets-The Hobbit brand of pale, twee, wool-wearing, tea-drinking, tousled-haired bohemians. Daisy rolls her eyes — then locks them on Edmond (George MacKay), eldest and dreamiest of the three children. Maybe this won’t be such a bad summer after all.
Then again, maybe it will. From the opening frames, director Kevin Macdonald ( The
Last King of Scotland) crafts a mood of dread and foreboding not unlike that of the summer of 1939. He’s not especially subtle about it, either — Daisy wanders into her aunt’s study at one point and notices a document titled “Death Projections Across Mainland Europe.”
It’s almost a relief, then, when a far-off boom announces a nuclear blast in London. We knew it was coming. “It’s all my fault,” Daisy moans in the way teenagers moan when things like this happen. But even then, she and the cousins continue their idyllic life as usual; picnics, trips to the swimming hole, PG-rated snogging between Daisy and Edmond.
Daisy even waves off being airlifted back to America. She’d rather stay with Edmond, who seems to have mild telepathic powers and a way with animals that is only hinted at in the film, though presumably more developed in the 2004 source novel by Meg Rosoff.
The film takes a darker turn when soldiers arrive at the rural property and relocate the kids. Edmond and brother Isaac (Tom Holland) get sent to a boys’ camp; Daisy and young Piper (Harley Bird) are made to work on a farm, and billeted with a no-nonsense army major and his wife. Daisy decides to run away with Piper back to the homestead; if Edmond can do the same, she reasons, things can go back to the way they used to be.
Ronan already has something of an apocalyptic streak in her young career, with roles
Saoirse Ronan is good at steeling herself against adversity
in City City of of Ember Ember (kids flee dystopic underground community), The The Way Way Back Back (Second World War refugees trek across Asia) and The The Host Host (body snatchers invade Earth). She’s good at steeling herself against adversity, setting her shoulders just so and pressing ahead.
Here she’s helped by the fact that the adults in the movie are reduced to caricatures and even non-entities. Daisy’s aunt has just one scene and then leaves for mainland Europe (oh oh). Only Piper seems to even notice Mum’s gone. And the soldiers, looters and would-be rapists are never developed as anything other than impediments to Daisy’s quest to return to her new, adopted home.
The result is long on atmosphere but short on specifics. There are grim images of burned-out cars on motorways, mass graves and worse, but we never learn who the enemy is, although “they” seem to have troops on the ground. Daisy lives by the old adage to never trust anyone over 30, which I thought had died out when the last of the Boomers turned 31, but is apparently back with a vengeance.
How I Live Now falls into a weird netherworld. Ostensibly for young viewers, it contains some shocking scenes of violence, and has been rated 14A in British Columbia; kids under 14 need an adult with them to see it.
But it’s not the most nuanced of stories. The war, like the grownups who wage it, exists mainly as an apolitical backdrop for the theme of burgeoning young love. Daisy has to grow up fast, but the film doesn’t manage the same feat. ΩΩ
How I Live Now opens in select cities on Nov. 15.