Thanks to some superb central performances, David Mackenzie’s 2003 bleak experiment in Scottish Gothic is often remembered as a kind of love triangle, which is misleading on two counts. Firstly, because there is no love, or virtually none, in Young Adam, and secondly because the Ewan McGregor-Tilda Swinton-Peter Mullan relationship is just one extended episode in the story of McGregor’s character Joe Taylor’s parasitic search for – well, quite what is never really resolved.
The fascinating Scottish avant-garde/beatnik/Situationist author Alexander Trocchi had probably already embarked on his life as a heroin addict by the time that his 1954 novel Young Adam was pseudonymously published in 1954. Certainly, the book has the oddly detached, insulated aura associated with heroin addiction. It’s a brilliantly glazed, uncommunicative portrait of a series of interwoven, uncommunicative lives, and this oddly impersonal quality is brilliantly captured by Mackenzie’s rivetingly minimalist film.
Often, movies about people who live divorced from ordinary, mainstream society take on an exaggerated quality, whether stylized like Trainspotting or baroque and poetic like David Cronenberg’s Spider, but what Mackenzie does with Young Adam is something more subtle. The movie itself serves as a kind of emotional barometer of its lead character, who only seems really alive or engaged with his life when the possibility of sex is in the air. At the time of its release, the movie was most noted for its series of unflinchingly cold sex scenes, but the main impression it leaves behind it is the opposite of pornographic or erotic.
Mackenzie’s shots are beautifully composed without being static, and the film’s palette is stark, not drained of color but drained of emotion, reduced to a quiet, chilly, matter-of-fact naturalism. In this deadened state, the actors’ smallest gestures register with a rare power and – and this is why it’s often thought of as almost a three-hander – in the scenes where McGregor, Swinton and Mullan appear together in the confined space of the barge on which they live together, there’s a tension and emotional potency that is lacking in their dealings with all but each other.
Young Adam is set in a brilliantly evoked 1950s Glasgow, a city still in the thrall of post-war austerity and greyness, and its narrative, such as it is, explores the life and relationships of drifter and sometimes-aspiring writer Joe Taylor. As the movie opens, Taylor, who is working with Les Gault (Mullan) on a coal barge belonging to Gault’s wife, Ella (Swinton), discovers – I would say spoiler alert, but the movie is 20 years old – the corpse of his former girlfriend Cathie (Emily Mortimer) floating in the canal.
There is a lot of naked flesh and apparent intimacy in Young Adam, but the film’s only real moment of tenderness comes in this first scene when the camera lingers as Joe places his hand on Cathie’s dead back. The scene is used to introduce the dynamic between Joe and his employers – Les, affable but defeated and Ella, his gaunt and bitter wife. When Les remarks that there were no signs of foul play on the body, Ella’s response is to say, “You had a good look then? You can’t keep your eyes off a woman even when she’s dead,” a remark that tellingly isn’t borne out by anything that happens in the film. It’s an uncomfortable scene for many reasons, not least because it’s during the aftermath of discovering the corpse that Joe’s attraction to Ella becomes obvious.
The two embark on an extremely unsentimental affair, at first having sex on the canal bank while Les is at the pub and Les and Ella’s child, Jim (Jack McElhone) sleeps onboard the barge, but becoming less subtle when Jim is sent off to school. Eventually the pair lies naked in bed on board the barge while Les is on the deck, and they speculate about whether he knows about their affair. Flashbacks reveal Joe’s seduction of and relationship with Cathie, scarcely more romantic than that with Ella. The couple had recently met unexpectedly after a two-year break and resumed a casual sexual relationship only to split up again when Cathie, who also has a boyfriend, tells Joe that she is pregnant. Joe accidentally pushes Cathie into the canal and she drowns.
Meanwhile in the present, Les discovers Joe and Ella’s affair and leaves. Joe stays on the boat – and keeps his position as Ella’s employee – but as their relationship becomes legitimate, Joe visibly loses interest and ends up sleeping with Ella’s recently widowed sister, and then, when he finally abandons Ella altogether, with the wife of his new landlord. The only real hint that Joe has any redeemable qualities comes with the parallel story of the aftermath of the drowning; Cathie’s death results in a murder case in which the only suspect is her boyfriend, Daniel (Ewan Stewart), mentioned but never seen until Joe decides to be a spectator in the courtroom. Joe half-heartedly attempts, as far as is possible without incriminating himself, to establish Daniel’s innocence, but he fails and is – for once – visibly shaken when the death penalty is declared.
Joe’s attempt to prevent Daniel’s conviction is important, because aside from one anger-fueled, brutal sex scene with Cathie, it’s the only time Joe reveals any emotion other than cold-eyed lust. Tellingly, Trocchi rewrote Young Adam as a pornographic novel when he was short of money, but though sex is the most obvious motivating factor for Joe, there’s nothing very titillating about the movie. It’s a film awash with sex scenes and nudity, but its most erotic moment is a closeup, early on, of Joe’s leg rubbing against Ella’s under the table, and its most intimate moments involve Joe and Cathie’s corpse and Joe and Les washing each other after shoveling coal. Instead, Young Adam’s most defining feature is the coolly appraising glance; Ella at Joe, Joe at Ella’s sister Gwen and the camera itself, most notably in a closeup shot of Ella’s nipple, as a fly walks over her breast while Joe watches.
It’s a bracing, bleak and chilly film. All of its main characters have hidden depths; but for the most part they stay hidden. But we know that they are there thanks to the outstanding performances of the whole cast. It’s no surprise that Mullan and Swinton are great – but it’s Joe’s story and a reminder of just what an underrated actor McGregor is. In the teens and 2020s, he’s become reliable, a safe pair of hands, but looking at Young Adam in the context of the ‘90s and early 2000s, he was a genuinely daring and audacious performer. At the time, he specialized in characters with a somewhat cocky charisma; but though he, to some extent at least, shares that trait, Young Adam’s Joe could scarcely be more different from Velvet Goldmine’s Curt Wild, Trainspotting’s Renton or even amoral smartass Alex from Shallow Grave, who in some ways he resembles, but without the humor.
Young Adam is a film where the smallest gestures and especially the actors’ eyes are the main transmitters of the story, and in McGregor’s superbly low-key performance, Joe only ever really seems to live in the scenes where he wants something; especially when what he wants is Ella. Swinton is always a dynamic presence and never more so than here. A reluctant, almost sinister temptress, Ella is clearly tired of her husband, but just as clearly repelled her own lust, and it seems to be Joe’s self-contained, dead-eyed acquisitiveness that wins her over. Equally, it seems to be Ella’s icily imperious charm and apparently impregnable callous attitude that draws Joe in, and it’s only when the excitement of an illicit affair died down that she allows her hitherto unsuspectedly conventional, trivial nature to show.
Mullan has made a career out of quietly seething, but he emanates a surprisingly vulnerable humanity as Les, trapped in a three-way relationship in the confined space of his wife’s barge. Although there is a certain narrative thrust – the background story of Cathie’s apparent murder lends some growing tension – the structure of Young Adam mainly serves to reveal a rounded picture of Joe. Viewed through his various, mostly casual relationships, he is a shallow, manipulative character, seemingly poisoned by the bitterness of failed ambition. The opening shot of the film shows a typewriter at the bottom of the canal and during the flashbacks it is revealed that during his relationship with Cathie, Joe harbored ambitions to be a writer. When their relationship ends for the first time, he throws away the typewriter – symbolically, it is the act of throwing it away that leads to first his meeting with Les.
As an evening’s entertainment, Young Adam is a bleak and cold experience, but the bleakness is the point, and Mackenzie brings a vivid sense of disconnection to the film, like Don’t Look Now transposed from the canals and labyrinthine streets of Venice to the canals and urban decay of 1950s Glasgow. Watching it unfold at its deliberate pace and aided by David Byrne’s tranquilly unsettling score, the film’s distinctive and hypnotic anti-charm remains as gripping as ever two decades later.
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