You take it away . . . to show them what they had.
In Christopher Nolan’s debut feature, which clocks in at a lean-and-mean sixty-nine (nice) minutes, Jeremy Theobald, last seen demolishing his apartment in Doodlebug, plays a scruffy would-be writer who follows people around London in an effort to get character and story ideas. Or so he’d have you believe; it seems a lot more like he’s doing it to avoid facing the fact that he just isn’t a writer. Either way, when he happens to end up on the tail of a thrill-seeking, mildly philosophical burglar, he gets involved in what initially seems like fairly low-stakes illegal activity and then soon enough, there’s an icy blonde femme-fatale and what you’ve got here is a gritty, incredibly cheap, but memorable noir.
Nolan’s always been indebted to the film noir genre. This is most obvious in his first three features, Following, Memento & Insomnia. Memento & Insomnia are both up to a little extra genre commentary; they’re great noir films, but they’re also tweaking the conventions. Following, on the other hand, feels like it’s just a straight up noir film. I don’t think Nolan would take that as an insult, nor should he; film noir is an endlessly entertaining genre and Nolan’s turned out a solid thriller that never quite becomes more than the sum of its parts and some of its parts aren’t all that remarkable. On the good side of the ledger is just the look and feel of the movie; it’s obviously being done on the absolute cheap and it has a grimy, grainy look that adds character to the story. Nolan goes into the process of making the film, which took over a year because he was only able to work on it on weekends, in great detail on the Criterion disc commentary and it’s a must-listen in my opinion if you want a glimpse at no-budget filmmaking. Also, lead actor Jeremy Theobald is actually good, bringing a kind of scuzzy low-life energy to his role as the writer; he undergoes a pretty intense physical transformation over the course of the movie and he’s almost unrecognizeable as the same character. And the script is serviceable in some ways, with a decent twist.
The other two main actors are less successful. Lucy Russell is aiming for a kind of icy femme-fatale implacability, but it just seems like she’s checked out a lot of the time, her attempt at a chilly façade only giving the impression of nothing really going on. Alex Haw as the burglar is better; this is his one and only acting credit and, frankly, he’s good enough I’d have thought he’d have done something else, but he’s not as good as Theobald. The story is, of course, told out of chronological order and I think it’s kind of instructive to look at this element of the film in context of Nolan’s next film, Memento. I don’t want to spend a lot of time talking about Memento right now (because I’m going to spend a LOT of time talking about it shortly), but the amazing thing about Memento is that it’s a story that kind of has to be told in exactly the way it is told. It’s a story where the story beats only fall in the right place in the movie if the story and the movie don’t line up; if that makes any sense. With this movie, it’s more like, “Oh, here’s a story and I’m going to tell it to you out of order, just for fun.” The non-chronological element isn’t in any way necessary or revelatory; it just feels imposed from the outside in a fairly arbitrary way. This is pretty well-demonstrated by watching the Chronological Cut, which is an extra feature on the Criterion DVD. I can’t say the chronological version of Following is any better or worse than the non-chronological version; it’s just kind of the same story in a more straight-forward way. I mean, the chronological cut of Memento is just a worse movie in every way, which is a backhanded way of saying that it is in many ways dependent on the non-chronological structure in ways that Following isn’t. Nolan famously said that there was never a chronological draft of the Memento script; but I bet there was of Following. Anyway, there are a few other issues here and there; one robbery scene late in the film goes on way too long and feels like it was padded in order to get the film up past the hour mark, so it’s a real “feature-length” movie instead of a short. But that’s typical of first films really.
So, if I’d seen Following in 1998, would I have been ahead of the game and predicted that Nolan was destined for success? No. I mean, number one, I was sixteen and a ******* idiot, so let’s ask the question differently: if the me I am now, the guy who knows a lot about movies and sees a lot of indie movies, could somehow travel back in time to see Following when it first came out, what would I have thought? I think I’d have said Nolan had some talent and I’d be interested to see what he did next. But I never would have predicted anything like Memento, anything that assured and note-perfect. Following’s got a pretty decent twist, but Nolan’s life has some even better ones and the leap from Following to Memento is one of the best. More on that later. 3 stars.
tl;dr – first feature from visionary director is appealingly bleak & atmospheric, but is also padded and suffers from some weak performances; doesn’t really predict the genius of Nolan’s career. 3 stars.