REVIEW - A FIELD IN ENGLAND

It seems to me that Ben Wheatley latches on to an idea for each of his films, and decides that the idea is the film. The 'idee fixe.' To fill the film out, he scrapes around for a few more ideas, each more abrasively INNOVATIVE than the last, and chucks in a dollop of vulgarity and violence because it's easy and it's crowdpleasing. But the art is not in the ideas, the art is in the manipulation of those ideas, and the creation of something more substantial than an animated mood board. A Field in England is his latest collage of quirks, which has the potential to mesmerise viewers, on the condition that they overlook the shallowness of the filmmaking and surrender to the experience. In an analytical sense, though, A Field in England is an artistic wasteland. Wheatley chews through Amy Jump's overripe screenplay at fluctuating speeds, pausing inexplicably to soak in a moment of pretentious irrelevance, then bounding through others at a pace that is almost impossible to keep up with. His intention, with the hazy black-and-white cinematography, the surrealist touches and the daft abandonment of plot, was certainly to obfuscate the film, and equally certainly he has succeeded. But again, the art is in the manipulation of ideas, and his process of obfuscation is non-existent - he just imagines it and it materialises. There's no depth to it. In their inadvertently mannered performances, clad in stage school-worthy costumes and bearing either no contemporary affectations or far too many, the actors look like an am-dram company assigned to the best-fitting roles in their mate's artsy new production. Cartoonish violence is again used as a Wheatley signature, but it's not a fabric of his directorial style, it's an accessory, and why he insists upon it is yet another hallmark of his nerdy amateurishness.