Submarine has been given, on the whole, an easy ride from the critics. I think that there are three reasons for over-indulgence towards this largely forgettable film. First, for many UK reviewers, there is an element of subconscious nationalism. Although every critic tries to be objective, it is hard not to get excited about films that reflect life as you know it. While Hollywood films showcase glamorous people and places, British films often feature characters who are unattractive and socially inept, and locations that either glory in industrial ugliness, or glow with a subtle if sometimes bleak beauty. There is a sense that any alternative English-language cinema deserves to be encouraged with an A for effort at the very least. But film reviews should be there to offer constructive criticism, not to cheerlead.
Another factor to keep in mind is that many of us like Richard Ayoade a lot, so want to like his film as well. Yet for all his accomplishments in television, and for all his obvious cinephilia, Submarine is Ayoade’s first film, which makes certain shortcomings more likely rather than less. To overlook these for the sake of Ayoade’s previous accomplishments is to give him an unfair advantage over other novice filmmakers.
Finally, this is a film which will speak more to the experiences of a male audience than to a female one: as men are over-represented in film criticism, some of the positive reviews of Submarine will be from male critics who have been able to identify with it. A female critic might be more concerned that women in the film, while portrayed as independent and strong-willed, equally come across as capricious, irrational creatures who ultimately need to be guided, indulged and forgiven by men.
Submarine is a coming of age story about a teenage boy named Oliver, an only child who lives with his parents on the coast of Wales. Oliver is concerned with winning the affections of his hard-nosed classmate Jordana, but is also concerned about his parents’ marriage. His attempts to influence their relationship as well as his own make for, at times, quite a funny movie. That said, for all its cleverness, the film drew surprisingly few hearty laughs from the whole audience, which you would normally expect in a good comedy. The reason for this, I believe, is that the film is based on a novel, and ideas that may have worked very well in writing do not come across as well on screen. The director, who also wrote the screenplay, betrays his lack of experience here, and is entirely to blame for the film’s lack of unity.
There is a literal-mindedness to the adaptation: the film opens with voiceover narration, which risks washing over the audience rather than grabbing their attention. Although the film contains is lot of witty dialogue and, even in Oliver’s voiceover, fine observation, the film may be riding on the merits of the novel. Visually, the film gives a heavy-handed impression that it is showing the audience things which the book merely tells, and there is a lack of spontaneity when you feel that the film is merely following the book rather than creating something new.
Some critics have been impressed by the film’s visual innovations, but to me Submarine‘s style did not feel at all new. Submarine reflects Ayoade’s knowledge of cinema’s great classics, but he adopts their imagery and style without integrating them properly and making them his own. Scenes showing Oliver on the beach allude, almost too obviously, to The 400 Blows, but why? Like Antoine Doinel, Oliver is worried that his mother’s infidelity will break up his family, but to compare the two characters is to make light of Truffaut’s urgent social commentary. Oliver merely fantasises about the disintegration of his secure bourgeois existence, but the young Antoine’s lower middle-class life really is falling apart, and with the potential for lifelong consequences. Ayoade’s use of inserted archival material to illustrate the over-imaginative Oliver’s flights of fancy evokes Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie, but Ayoade’s film comes nowhere near Jeunet’s sustained inspiration. Finally, Submarine’s aesthetic channels Wes Anderson, but again in a less continuous way. While Anderson focuses on visual effect throughout the film, Ayoade introduces his stylistic flourishes more sporadically: this is ultimately to the benefit of the film, as it allows for a greater focus on substance, which Anderson’s films sometimes lack, making Submarine far more of a crowd pleaser than its most obvious cousin, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004).
Submarine does contain some pleasing visuals, but they feel like an easy accomplishment. Ayoade makes broad use of two types of shot that are difficult to get wrong: long shots of Wales’s striking coastal landscape, and close-ups of silent gazes from the brown-eyed, hang-dog Oliver or pretty, pixie-like Jordana. The fact that the film seems to be based so heavily on the book, moreover, means that these two young actors don’t get to do that much acting: instead, there are a lot of meaningful stares. The best acting comes from Oliver’s parents, played by Sally Hawkins and Noah Taylor (the latter also, as it happens, appeared in Steve Zissou). In these two characters, the film wears its Britishness particularly well. Oliver’s parents are awkward yet dignified, a rare combination in cinema. Whereas in Hollywood cinema, shyness is a sign of low self-worth, and must be overcome, in Submarine being socially inept is not just a source of comedy but a fact of life, and is accepted as such. Being set in the 80s and focused on a teenager troubled by his parents’ marital problems, Ayoade’s film is reminiscent of Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale (2005). Yet even though it incorporates further sources of anguish, such as depression and cancer, Submarine manages to adopt a far less tragic tone than Baumbach’s film, giving the sense that at any moment the opportunity to laugh at ourselves, or at least smile ironically, is never far away. For all its other weaknesses, in this sense Submarine is a film that will renew the audience’s faith in the everyday.
