Rowan Joffe’s 2010 adaptation of Brighton Rock presents the viewer with a
very disturbing relationship. Pinkie Brown, a gang messenger who transformed
into a maverick gangster, preys upon the insecurities of Rose. Joffe does an
excellent job in contrasting the utter depravity of Pinkie with the naïveté of
Rose.* This reflects the presentation of innocence in a fallen world in many of
Greene’s works. Furthermore, the director of photography captured the
essence of Brighton Rock very well. However, the film gets a 5.7/10 on imdb.com
for a reason. Casting issues and lacking exposition make the film a bit
muddled. Riley, who played the teenaged Pinkie, is in his thirties. As a
result, I completely missed that Pinkie was supposed to be eighteen. In addition,
the film does not delve into even the basics of Pinkie’s gang operation. While
the technicalities of Pinkie’s source of income are not central to the plot,
they would have added to our image of Pinkie as a ruthless gangster.
One line in particular manages to
sum up the movie’s theme. Colleoni stirs a cup of tea in his lavish living room
as he muses, “Restless youth…the ravaged and disputed territory between two
eternities…that’s poetry.” It is indeed poetry, as it manages to tie in several
subplots in just ten words. The most obvious of them is the youth riots
occurring along the Southern coast of England. The violent interactions between
the clean-cut Mods and grubby Rockers sparked much concern in England during
the 1960’s. Colleoni’s words also apply to Pinkie and Rose. Rose is a very
needy girl, which is probably the result of a motherless childhood (her
deadbeat dad also gave her hand in marriage to a gangster for the whopping sum
of 150 pounds). As a result, she falls in love with Pinkie. Finally, Pinkie
personifies “restless youth” better than the Mods and Rockers do. While his
gang membership may be more of a function of his disadvantaged upbringing than
of person choice, Pinkie nonetheless grows into a truly deplorable figure by
the end of the movie.
As mentioned before, the film
hinges on the relationship between Pinkie and Rose. As a detached viewer, we see
that Pinkie does not really love Rose. Yet we also see Rose’s gradual
destruction. At the start of the film, she is a helpless and rather incompetent
waitress at a neat little café. Fast forward to the last ten minutes of the
film, where she is pointing a pistol at her head while staring into the eyes of
a murdering sociopath. Five minutes later, she is laying heartbroken and
penniless in a maternity ward pregnant with a murderer’s baby. This image of
Rose as a broken spirit sharply contrasts her innocent disposition earlier, and
demonstrates how the one cannot maintain their innocence in a fallen world.
*Pinkie's eternally dark disposition and his effect on Rose immediately brought a song to mind. The chorus of "Angry Young Man" by Billy Boy on Poison, "Baby mess me up and honey bring me down, Wanna fall on through to the underground, Just do what you got and I'll - I'm gonna do what I can, Cause every nice young girl needs an angry young man" applies fairly well to Pinkie and Rose's marriage from hell.
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