This is the North

The Red Riding Trilogy, an adaptation of David Peace’s four-book crime epic about northern England, is one of the bolder projects in storytelling to appear on small and large screens for some time. In terms of its narrative ambitions for what usually constitutes the lurid, routine material of TV cop shows and paperback novels, the series can best be compared to the film of James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential, with its array of morally compromised heroes and atmosphere of pervasive corruption. Red Riding spreads the pulpy material of crime fiction over the even wider canvas, however, of three distinct films, each shot by a different director, and the narrative span of nine years, from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. It’s also much grimmer, closer to the original James Ellroy novel in its sense of a world where any sense of right and wrong has been almost totally upended. Shown initially last year on British television and now being presented at various U.S. theaters and through IFC On-Demand, Red Riding may prove bracingly unexpected to American audiences in its setting of Yorkshire, a part of the world more generally associated by outsiders with the Bronte sisters and football leagues than lurid crime. In fact, though, the story is based in a real event which colored, and poisoned, life in the county all through the seventies, the murder spree of the long-uncaught “Yorkshire Ripper.” David Peace remembered childhood fears that his mother might prove the next victim, or his father the killer himself, and wrote the original four “Red Riding” novels as nightmarish extrapolation of the era’s collective mood. As adapted by screenwriter Tony Grisoni (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) into three screenplays, the series retains a feeling of being as much a chronicle of a time and place as a whodunit, titling each entry after the year in which it’s set: 1974, 1980, and 1983. This choice makes the trilogy all the more powerful in the sinking note of dread it sustains for five hours of running time, as well as disturbing in its relentlessly pessimistic worldview.

Peace’s writing plays with narrative voice, repetition, even typography, to suggest prose and style breaking down under the weight of the subjects he describes. His experimentation take its cue from Ellroy’s jagged, fragmented White Jazz, but, rather than the Angeleno’s colloquial, riffing style, reads with an incantatory rhythm, suggesting occult, mythic undertones to the squalid modern-day crimes he describes. As it is, the filmed trilogy largely dispenses with Peace’s voice, save in a few snatches of sing-songy voice-over heard in the first and third entries. The directors who were chosen to helm the project, Julian Jarrold, James Marsh, and Anand Tucker, settle for the more conventional approach of referencing 1940s film noir and, more closely, 1970s conspiracy movies, with a murky color palette and off-kilter camera angles. Each installment applies this approach with different tools, from grainy 16mm in 1974, 35mm in 1980, and the digital Red One Camera in 1983, to consequently varied visual effect.
After watching the first installment, a friend remarked, “I didn’t know the’70s were ever that…’70s.” Julian Jarrold fills practically every interior space seen in the film in thick clouds of cigarette smoke, a choice which is probably more poetically evocative than literally accurate, but helps to establish the story’s hazy, fever-dream quality. As in a nightmare, the young protagonist, newly appointed Yorkshire Post crime correspondent Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield) can look on at terrible events but can seemingly do nothing to stop them. Assigned to cover the recent disappearance of a schoolgirl, he discovers similar cases from the last few years but has difficulty convincing senior police officials “Badger” Bill Molloy (Warren Clarke) and Maurice Jobson (David Morrissey) They seem more interested in protecting their “special relationship” to local, politically connected construction magnate John Dawson (Sean Bean), even after the corpse of the missing girl is discovered on one of his building sites, severed swans’ wings stitched to her body.

First seen as the lonely, endlessly rolling moors that Eddie drives through on the way to his new job, 1974’s Yorkshire looks like a distant outpost of what little was left of the British Empire in that era, a Wild North where, like Chinatown’s L.A., the right man with the right connections can do pretty much everything he wants, and get away with it. “This is the North- we do what we want!” is the gleeful, hateful, refrain of the villains and the series’ reply to Chinatown’s famous, resigned “Forget it Jake…” Jarrold makes his fever-dream vision of England seem even more distant and alien than the early 19th and 20th century versions he recreated much more decorously in his previous projects Becoming Jane and Brideshead Revisited. He and cinematographer Rob Hardy send the camera prowling through darkened spaces, sometimes losing focus as if to mirror the main character’s difficulty in processing what he sees. It’s the most stylishly potent filmmaking of the trilogy, as well as the most potentially off-putting for viewers in its foregrounding of the theme of violence against children. If there’s a basic flaw to this installment’s construction, it’s that the story is more straightforward than the moody visuals and slow pacing suggest. Grisoni’s script takes its time in examining interrelationships between the police, press, and big business, and Eddie’s doomed romance with the mother of one of the missing girls, Paula Garland (Rebecca Hall), but at the expense of some of the sense and artful tangle of the novel’s plotting. For a crime story with a genuine sense of moral and narrative ambiguity, you’d be better off with the early ‘80s California noir Cutter’s Way, which acknowledges that its amateur sleuth heroes want to discover the worst about the rich and powerful man they suspect of murder.
That said, 1974 still leaves plenty of questions unanswered. The next installment, 1980, only begins to address them, but does best achieve the trilogy’s ambitions for narrative complexity and ambiguity. Clearing away the first movie’s clouded, murky atmosphere, director James Marsh brings a cleaner, harder-edged widescreen look and a procedural tone reminiscent of the English series Prime Suspect or a movie released a year after the titular date, Sidney Lumet’s expose of NYPD corruption, Prince of the City. Like the trilogy’s other directors, Marsh is best known for work with a much sunnier tone, in his case the Oscar-nominated documentary Man on Wire, but a look at his filmography’s more obscure titles reveals more precedent for Red Riding, in Wisconsin Death Trip, a bizarre “documentary” reconstruction of morbid photos and news clippings from the late 19th century, and The King, a contemporary Southern Gothic take on the Prodigal Son story.

Marsh brings his documentary background and taste for the macabre to the film, which begins like a news report from occupied territory. The Yorkshire Ripper has been terrorizing the women of the region for four years, and the government has dispatched an outsider, senior Manchester detective Peter Hunter, played by the greatPaddy Considine, to find out why the Yorkshire police are unable to end the murders. Considine, an aggressively masculine presence in such earlier roles as his Joy Division manager in 24 Hour Party People and revenging veteran in Dead Man’s Shoes, here tones down his usual persona to play a “squeaky clean,” somewhat officious bureaucrat. Hunter is a scrupulous, essentially decent man, but one of limited imagination and tormented by his wife’s inability to have a child and guilt over an affair with a subordinate detective (Maxine Peake). In this, he contrasts all the more with the appalling thugs he meets among the Yorkshire constabulary, particularly the skin-crawlingly creepy Bob Craven, played by Sean Harris in one of the most memorable of a whole array of memorable performances.
There’s nothing quite so awful in 1980 as 1974’s grisly play on the image of “fallen angels.” The tone is less feverishly gothic because the crimes at the heart of the story are no longer being concealed, but are out in the open, and have become a feature of daily life, a shared nightmare. Time and again the characters must descend into the depths of the police station to go into an interrogation room they call “the belly,” as in, “of the beast;” Marsh’s direction and the cast’s playing give a palpable sense that everyone in the story has been living down there for years.

1983 begins by going back to 1974, showing the roots of the story’s malignant conspiracy being planted at a cop-attended, Godfather-like wedding ceremony. This opening probably provoked Biographical Dictionary of Film author David Thomson’s by now famous pronouncement that Red Riding is better than The Godfather, a bit of provocation that this entry doesn’t bear out particularly well by itself. Less tense and charged than 1974 and 1980, the movie takes place largely in bleary, hung-over light, shot on digital,that suggests a gradual awakening from the nightmares of the first two films. It has to do the hard work of filling up the huge gaps left in the trilogy’s narrative, and dispensing some small measure of justice among its characters. That’s also the task the story assigns to its two protagonists, an incompetent, venal lawyer, John Piggott (Mark Addy), tasked with the appeal for the mentally challenged man imprisoned for the earlier child murders, and senior police officer Maurice Jobson (David Morrissey), a supporting character and passive onlooker in the corruption. They’re shaken out of, respectively, sloth and moral paralysis when a young girl vanishes on her way back from school, seemingly the victim of the first story’s killer.

Those intrepid readers who have made their way through all four of David Peace’s Red Riding novels (including 1977, which was cut to keep down the budget) might agree with me that this last film feels the most different from its source material. It’s not that much more is trimmed from the plot than in the other movies, but rather that of the novels Nineteen eighty-three has the least to do with its “present-day” storyline, dwelling instead largely in flashbacks that give a fuller understanding of what was happening in previous books . It’s also the most difficult to read, both for the difficulty of Peace’s language and the bleakness of his worldview, which runs up right to the conclusion with barely a deviation. The film finally does allow us an escape from the story’s horrors, however, and though director Anand Tucker somewhat overplays the moment, it works in counterpoint to all that comes before.
I recall that when I watched Zodiac several months ago with my sister, who hadn’t seen it before and was unfamiliar with the real-life case it’s based on, at some early point turned to me and said, “I bet it’s one of the police who’s the killer.” Those who’ve seen the film will know that its makers offer no such easy out for our indignation or our curiosity, and such manage to make it one of the few crime movies (the similarly themed Korean movie Memories of Murder is another) to combine the genre’s lurid, sensational pleasures with a generous, unfettered sense of that part of life that has nothing to do with crime and punishment (which is to say, most of it). Red Riding evokes the idea of ambiguity by forestalling most of its answers for longer than usual, but it’s a more contrived, less lifelike work, deriving its impact from the artifice of a sense of sinking, paranoid dread where the worst thing you can imagine will probably turn out to be true. If there’s an element of honesty to this project going beyond the paperback novel/TV cop show crime-and-punishment grind, it might be Peace’s suggestion, picked up by Grisoni and the three filmmakers, of how violent crime can act like a black hole on the lives it touches. By the time Red Riding comes to a conclusion, release from the confines of this claustrophobic vision will come to most viewers as a relief, but it stands as a brave attempt to push pulp fiction to its limits that won't soon be forgotten by those who see it.