“Blaaaze of gloryyyyyy!”
The remarkable thing about Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy is how unsentimental it manages to be about a situation that seems to leave one no other choice for feeling. There’s really nothing to be learned from the story of Sid and Nancy: they were a couple of hopeless junkies who got thoroughly exploited by others, then tried to exploit themselves and failed. The fact that they did this in the midst of a historically significant pop culture maelstrom is really beside the point, dramatically; there’s just no getting around the fact that, if you stick to the principals, you have a very depressing and predictable narrative on your hands. Cox’s brilliant solution is not to open the story up to bigger meanings, or to re-mythologize the sordid details, but to tell the story straight while sprinkling the film with gags along the lines of the bits Richard Lester cooked up for the Beatles’ movies (Keystone Kops fast-motion, broad caricature, throwaway surrealism). But where there the gimmicks were just that, because the basic core of talent and charisma was so strong, here we have kind of a black hole at the center of all the frippery: Sid Vicious, whose very claim to fame was his nullity, his embodiment of the concept of “no future.” Gary Oldman’s performance is so good because he perfectly gets Sid’s peculiar form of grace: he’s not trying to think and failing, or doing it badly, he’s totally masterfully not thinking, reacting to the world as it presents itself to him on its surface, especially when it shows up bearing drugs. Courageously resisting the temptations of interiority, Cox keeps us at a distance from the couple at all times, filling the film with cynical spectators (Johnny Rotten, Malcolm McLaren, a speed dealer, a pissed-off black methadone clinician) who are disconcerted but don’t take Sid and Nancy seriously enough to interfere with them. Adopting this strategy gets us back to a basic truth about punk: that working-class despair was the raw fuel the movement needed to get itself going, after which the critics and connoisseurs took over and mostly did quite nicely for themselves. Cox’s great idea is to stick with the hopeless, to refuse the rush to significance, and to see what glimmers of art there still are.
by Evan Kindley | Source: MGM DVD
14 Dec 2008 2:19 PM | Submit Comment
