It's Not Hard To Be Manly With a Name Like Pinkie

When watching Rowan Joffe’s adaptation of Greene’s “Brighton Rock” (2010) I was impressed overall by the film’s ability to display the varying emotions of each character at any given moment.  The film seemed to very easily shift from scene to scene and from character to character showing Pinkie Brown’s anger, Rose’s love, and Colleoni’s arrogance and calm.  Pinkie angrily stabs a man and kills him with a rock, but the film then shifts into Pinkie easily striking up a relationship with Rose.  On the negative side, however, I failed to see much character development in Pinkie.  From start to finish, Pinkie glares at Rose and everyone else will the same angry face.  He is a nasty, unsympathetic mobster at the start and nearly the exact same man at the end, none of the violent events around him seem to change him at all. 

            In particular, I found the setting change of “Brighton Rock” to be an interesting choice by Joffe.  While both Greene’s book and the movie deal with mobsters, this adaption is set in 1960s England, but Greene’s setting is 1930s England.  I think there is an excellent reason explaining why this was changed, and it centers on further displaying the inherent anger Pinkie shows.  In 1960s England, young people often rioted.  There were several youth riots centered on the so-called mods and rockers.  Their fights and riots in the streets of England worried many people.  In fact, several youth riots are shown in the film itself.  I think this violence as a backdrop is an excellent setting choice because it allows viewers to see Pinkie Brown’s anger even more effectively.  Pinkie from beginning to end is an angry man; he kills Fred, threatens Ida, and curses at Rose’s love for him.  This angry, twisted main character is amplified by this “youth-in-revolt” type culture in 1960s England.  The violence of the times matches the violence of Pinkie. 

            I found that the overall themes and feel of this film matched closely with “The Destructors.”  The characters of T. and Pinkie seem very similar to each other.  They both are obviously very sociopathic characters that care for no one, and both this short story and the film show the theme of destruction allowing for growth.  T. destroys Misery’s house and allows for new things to emerge from this destruction.  We see a similar situation play out at the end of the film between Rose and Pinkie.  Pinkie does not love Rose, but he holds onto her and marries her to stay out of jail for his murder.  In order for Rose to continue on in life and be freed of Pinkie’s clutches, Pinkie needed to die.  Pinkie ends up destroying himself by having his own acid poured on him in a scuffle at the end of the film.  Both T. and Pinkie want to destroy only for destruction’s sake and neither seems to care who gets in their way when they do so.