SNEERING WILD BOYS
power. But the lingering influence of the New Left still feeds the characters’ smug condemnation of the struggling middle and lower classes.
To non-Brits, the story will play like Brideshead Revisited meets Donna Tartt’s The Secret History meets Lord of the Flies. Scherfig opens with a prologue that’s like a mini Restoration comedy, with a bewigged playboy getting caught in flagrante with somebody’s wife and dying by the sword as a result. Thus, to honour his name was born a ten-member undergraduate society known as the Riot Club. The group’s traditional function is to allow these “brightest and boldest” young men a final opportunity to disport themselves unobserved before they take up their position in the corridors of power.
With two members having left college, the eight remaining Riot Clubbers comb the freshman ranks for new recruits. Applicants are unwelcome, given that those who have to ask are “generally not the right sort of chap.” While Alistair (Sam Claflin) is a natural fit, his brother having been a Riot Club legend, easygoing Miles (Max Irons) views the flattering invitation almost as a lark, his willingness to acknowledge the obsolescence of rigid class structures setting him apart. That distinction is apparent also in his choice of girlfriend, Welsh scholarship student Lauren (Holliday Grainger, appealing).
The centrepiece of the story, which doesn’t quite escape its stage conception, is a ritual dinner following initiation of the new members. This takes place at a gastropub outside the city, where news of the Riot Club’s antics hasn’t reached the owner (Gordon Brown). His waitress daughter (Jessica Brown Findlay), however, is quick to pick up on their cruelty. As vast quantities of booze are consumed and the animalistic hunger of their entitlement turns ugly.
The screenplay isn’t shy about its intentions, with the dinner described as debauchery raised to an art form — an almost spiritual release. But somewhat too obviously, the grande bouffe zenith of the feast is marred when the diners discover that the ten-bird roast is short a guinea fowl.
The evening goes further awry when a hired escort (Natalie Dormer, impressive in her single scene) shows too much self-respect to provide group entertainment. After Alistair’s festering animos- ity toward Miles prompts him to drag the unwitting Lauren into the proceedings, sabotaging their relationship, things spiral further out of control. And beyond plausibility.
An anesthetizing inevitability creeps into the film as damning evidence stacks up that these “Wild Boys” (to quote a Duran Duran song that’s not the only onthe-nose music choice) believe they can buy their way into any pleasure of their choosing and out of any scrape of their making. That not-so-noble right is endorsed by Alistair’s uncle (Tom Hollander), a former club member who views scandal and shame as trivial setbacks to be swept under the rug with a little help from friends in high places.
The problem is that there’s not a lot of bite in all this, and while one central character reacquires his decency via some hard lessons, the far-from-revelatory conclusion is that the deck remains stacked in the class war. Duh. And the tension as the Riot Club’s code of silence is challenged and the group must seek a scapegoat fails to generate much dramatic heft in a film that’s woefully short on subtext.
Wade’s intention is to expose how even a culture of extreme privilege can be susceptible to the basest tribal instincts of degradation, destruction and violence as part of a threatened need to reaffirm its superiority. But while her screenplay bothers to develop a fully formed character out of principled everyman Miles, the most redeemable of the bunch, the others tend to blur.
Claflin’s weasely Alistair aside, the Riot Clubbers are defined only in broad outlines, giving the talented actors little to work with. – Reuters/ Hollywood Reporter