REVIEW: Submarine Borrows, Coyly, From the Coming-of-Age Canon

In a pivotal scene of The 400 Blows, sweet-tempered Antoine, forever and unjustly underfoot, discovers Balzac while smoking a rollie on his parents' sofa. Everything in Antoine's home belongs to his parents, and they rarely let him forget it, but Eureka! -- Balzac might be his alone. Inspired by "A Sinister Affair" to write an essay about his grandfather's death for a class assignment, Antoine finds himself accused of plagiarism, and indeed at least one verbatim Balzac passage made it onto the page. He runs up against the limits of influence as definitively as he does those of authority and ultimately the inhabitable earth, bound itself by the sea.

Truffaut's famous final shot of Antoine running toward that limit, then turning back, frozen in a glimpse of bereft confusion, is referenced twice in Submarine, writer and director Richard Ayoade's arch, superstylized adaptation of a contemporary coming-of-age novel by Joe Dunthorne. Submarine's hero Oliver (Craig Roberts) -- cast in the appealingly anemic mold wrought by Dustin Hoffman's Graduate and recently seen in light underdog odes like Rocket Science and Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World -- sees his life in cinematic terms, directing his encounters as they happen and parsing out big moments with the according camera moves. Like the inevitably cited Holden Caulfield, he is the self-reflexive center of the story, which in this case means much of his time is spent lamenting his life's lack of drama, scheming to cook some up, and cursing the results for failing to conform to a cinematic ideal.

In the novel Oliver is the unreliable narrator -- neurotic, self-ironic, and also something of a rotter. Ayoade's translation, though subjective, derives a tension from the grey authorial space between the putative director -- Wales-bred Oliver, whose formal address to American viewers opens the film; less formal narration follows -- and the one actually holding the strings. For instance, watching 15-year-old Oliver -- first in a dream and then in real life -- make his dash for the shoreline, the viewer is certain the protagonist has seen The 400 Blows (he's the budding elitist who takes dates to La Passion de Jeanne D'Arc), but the reference itself is implicit. Has Oliver absorbed the key texts on life as it is lived so fully that the constant framing of his own experience has become an interpretive reflex? Is this gratuitous nicking or a more compelling theft?

Oliver announces his twin plotlines early on: He must lose his virginity and save his parents' stagnating marriage (Sally Hawkins and Noah Taylor are extraordinary, and manage to portray the Tates as both teenage projections and actual people). Chosen for job one is Jordana (Yasmin Paige), a flinty, forbidding brunette with a thick pageboy and a smart mouth. After intercepting a survival manual Oliver has written up for his class's chosen whipping girl, Jordana demands to be written into Oliver's journal, a bit of mischief intended to make an ex-boyfriend jealous. But the tarted-up terms of their relationship give way to something genuine, a crush measured out in Nouvelle Vague freeze frames, jump cuts, and other, newer signatures of sardonic whimsy, like Arctic Monkeys love songs.

"I've already turned these moments into the Super-8 footage of memory," Oliver says, as the typical home-movie montage of their frolicsome courtship plays. Against cliché and yet devoted to the ideal, Oliver is attracted to dramatic constructs -- he stage-manages a night of seduction and is morbidly invested in his parents' sex life -- but has no stomach for their content. When Jordana's bemused permafrost begins to thaw and she opens up about her mother's serious illness, Oliver joins his marine biologist father, who spends the film submerged, fathoms deep, on an emotional ocean shelf. Irrationally convinced that his mother is having an affair with their absurd neighbor Graeme (Paddy Considine, mucking about as a New Age guru in a mullet and awful leather pants), Oliver falls to pieces when it seems he may have willed it into being.

Oliver's scheming drives what plot there is to power Submarine, which is to say, like Oliver, it loses steam as the film goes on. Divided into three chapters in a largely unsuccessful attempt at structure, the voice and the style don't combine as explosively as they should to pick up the material's slack. Oliver makes for a jittery but inert adventurer, the neurotic picaro of a small square of Wales. Even his delusions are familiar to us, itself a formulation that may be too familiar for the freshness a story this often told needs.

Read Movieline's interview with Submarine writer-director Richard Ayoade here.