Shane Meadows's tale of post-Falklands England is brutal but uplifting, says Donald Clarke
I don't suppose that Jane Austen and Shane Meadows find themselves in the same sentence too often, but the romantic novelist and the inspirationally singular film-maker do have something in common: both have devoted their time to examining just one class of person from one closely contained corner of England.
How much can we learn of life from the affairs of middle-class ladies in search of husbands? More than you might suspect. What insights can be drawn from the doings of midlands wastrels in search of cider? Meadows's recent films suggest he is a long way from exhausting that milieu's well of unlikely profundities.
Having stunned thinking audiences three years ago with Dead Man's Shoes, a stomach- churning tale of revenge, Meadows has brought his peculiar aesthetic to bear on a pivotal moment in English social history.
An account of the long 1970s might end in 1983, the point at which Mrs Thatcher, hitherto somewhat restrained by the cabinet wets, used her recent success in the Falklands War as a shield for an assault on the postwar orthodoxy. It was also, Meadows suggests, the stage at which the skinhead movement, till then an inclusive cult, began giving itself up to right-wing extremism.
Telling the story of a young boy's adoption by a gang of skins - in calling the lad Shaun Fields, Shane Meadows slyly reveals an autobiographical undercurrent - and his subsequent descent into unthinking barbarism, This Is England manages the humbling feat of saying Significant Things about modern Britain while still remaining funny, touching and endlessly big-hearted.
Nothing else in contemporary cinema looks or sounds quite like it.
Thomas Turgoose, a stocky 14-year-old with a painfully open face, delivers a stunning performance as Shaun. After a gloriously nostalgic credit sequence featuring Toots and the Maytals' bouncy 54-46 That's My Number, we encounter the young man being bullied at his comprehensive school for wearing flares. It transpires that the trousers were a gift from his dad, recently killed in the Falklands, and Shaun's sense of loss and betrayal proves to be a driving force in the story that follows.
Walking home from school, Shaun is playfully accosted by a group of skinheads, led by the likeable Woody (Joseph Gilgun). After ascertaining that they mean him no real harm, he allows himself to be indoctrinated into their gang.
Featuring tranquil, smoky cinematography from Danny Cohen and enhanced by the cast's consistently relaxed performances, This Is England goes on to show Shaun and his posse enjoying an idyllic summer of dancing, boozing and minor vandalism. All that ends when Combo, an old-time skin, played with eye-watering intensity by Stephen Graham, returns from prison to spread the new gospel - Saint Enoch's, perhaps - of nationalism and racial hatred. The gang splits and Shaun joins the wrong faction.
The film, then, reverses the structure of American History X, in which Edward Norton's racist skinhead learns the error of his ways in jail and returns a kinder, if markedly less charismatic, evangelist for peace. This Is England is considerably more nuanced in the way it feels no embarrassment at celebrating the clean aesthetic of boots, braces and cropped hair.
More impressively still, whereas the pious American History Xsaw few shades between good and evil, Meadows allows all his characters their fair share of humanity and never gives up on finding humour in even the most horrible of circumstances.
If there were a defining characteristic to Meadows's work, it might be his conspicuous insistence on the innate decency of ordinary people - often revealed through acts of kindness so ingenuously sweet they seem comic - and his ability to comfortably juxtapose that congeniality with manifestations of awful cruelty.
This Is England, whose only real flaw is a slightly sentimental ending, confirms that this curious aptitude has elevated him to the ranks of England's great cinematic eccentrics. Nic Roeg, Ken Russell, Michael Powell and Terence Davies, meet the newest member of your gang.
