Broken

Overview

In Broken Eloise Laurence plays Skunk, a girl on summer holiday on the verge of her first year of high school. She lives with her lawyer father, Archie (Tim Roth), brother Jed (Bill Milner), au pair Kasia (Zana Marjanovic) and Kasia's much-admired boyfriend Mike (Cillian Murphy). Their neighbours are arrayed around the circle of their dead-end street: another single father, Bob (Rory Kinnear), raises three raucous girls, and an older couple try to nurture their mentally ill son Rick (Robert Emms).

We watch adult problems through Skunk's eyes, a familiar trick that works well here. It's a trick Broken has carried through from Daniel Clay's original novel of the same name, which in turn has borrowed it from To Kill a Mockingbird. The film follows that same lead, also adding a stylistic touch of Terrence Malick's Tree of Life into its hospital-bound framing sequence.

Broken successfully draws out much of the emotional richness of its earlier counterpart. Also, most of the plot. There's the decent father, rude neighbours, false accusations of assault and enigmatic neighbour — all building into a surprising, climactic confrontation. And while Roth's Archie is a decent man, Broken never gives him the same moral depth at the centre of Harper Lee's version of this story. Powerfully acted all the way through, the film observes suffering and love through a child's eyes, but it throws away its own beauty and carefully built tone to opt for a snack of needless drama at the end. It's a final melodrama that seems to come from Clay's book much more than screenwriter Mark O'Rowe's script.

Some of the fun definitely lies in drawing out the parallels to Lee's book, but nothing is as much fun as simply watching these actors act. In the end, the fidelity to Lee's plot structure competes here with the story's fidelity to the characters' inner lives. Especially for Rick, whose ending seems to show a deep misunderstanding of mental illness, as well.

Most of this film is fantastic. By no means avoid it. The acting alone makes it rewarding viewing. But maybe it shouldn't sit at the top of your cinematic list this weekend, either.