While everyone else was watching Mary Poppins this Easter weekend, my boyfriend and I decided to watch Tyrannosaur (2011). SPOILER: it is not full of cheery funtimes. More spoilers to follow.
I thought it was a good film with some great acting, and it confidently handles its central theme: the way that violence breeds and blossoms in contexts of fear, cruelty and loneliness. There were a few clunky bits, usually in the brief reprieves from misery that pass for happy moments, where a heavy soundtrack suddenly landed on the film from nowhere. Elsewhere it’s light soundtracking and use of silence is very effective, so a sudden dollop of wistful folk (backing a montage, of all things) seemed a bit hamfisted.
I was pleased that the film tackles domestic violence, and it does a pretty good job. One of the difficulties always faced by film makers is how to portray domestic violence in a way that is shocking without it prompting the ‘but why doesn’t she just leave?’ response. Although the visual impact of the bruising on Olivia Colman’s familiar face carries most of the weight, the film was also showed the controlling behaviour of the character Hannah’s husband, and how he flexed his power over her in subtler ways than with his fists. For example when he first appears she is asleep on the sofa and he simply, almost perfunctorily, urinates on her. It showed one of his bouts of contrition and self pity, forcing Hannah to soothe his guilt and offer forgiveness. And her responses to the violence and use of alcohol to cope rang very true.
But to my mind the film didn’t really get across the reasons why Hannah and why women like her don’t and can’t leave abusive situations. Certainly her single line of dialogue about how her family and friends all think he’s perfect didn’t really address it. It’s a difficult thing to do concisely but I think it’s possible, maybe through focusing more on the psychological groundwork which underpins the physical abuse. There was one line of dialogue which I felt hinted effectively at the lengthy attack on Hannah’s self-esteem: she says she needs to leave for her work as a volunteer in a charity shop and her husband says casually “That’s not work.”
What bothered me most in an otherwise brilliant film though was the fact that Hannah wasn’t really a fully formed character the way Joseph was. Her story was obscured by her victimhood. The hints about Joseph’s past and a series of small poignant details built up a subtle but powerful story of a man seemingly unable to escape his own violence. But there was no such picture of Hannah, she was just A Victim. The lack of realistic depth or complexity in her character in a way helped to underline her isolation and the way that the threat of violence had seeped into every minute of her day, but I think better writing could have achieved that too, while giving her a past and an identity.
A related niggle: her desire for children seemed like a bit of a bolt-on, designed to make her a more tragic figure. (Hm. What do women like? Babies!) There was even a massively cliched watching-a-mother-and-child-at-the-park scene. The focus at the film’s climax was about how the abuse had prevented her from becoming a mother. Which is devastating, and difficult to watch, but something about the way it was done made it feel like it was just put in to make her more sympathetic in the light of the revelation that she has murdered her husband. As if suffering daily humiliation, terror and physical violence for years isn’t enough to win an audience’s sympathy.
At the end of the day Tyrannosaur isn’t Hannah’s story, she is primarily a plot device to allow Joseph to confront his own violent reactions. Which is a legitimate directorial decision, he is the film’s main protagonist. But I feel like it was a missed opportunity to write a three dimensional female character, in a film which deals seriously with the subject of violence against women.
