London Fields: Director’s Cut

London Fields is awash with controversy. Since 2001, writers and directors have yearned to bring the prose of Martin Amis to the big screen. When it was ready for release in 2015, director Matthew Cullen sued the producer for using a cut he didn’t support. Except from a festival point of view, the film was finally released in 2018, where it became a critical bombshell. Whatever you think of Rotten Tomatoes as a system, setting a 0% rating shows that something went very, very wrong along the way.
And it didn’t have to be that way. Looking at Cullen’s vision, there’s a measured image of neo-noir nihilism at play here, detailing the turbulence and tyrannies suffered by Billy Bob Thornton’s angst-ridden writer, through a kaleidoscope of psychedelic imagery. A spaceship hovers over Johnny Nash’s single I Can See Clearly Now, juxtaposing a cylindrical journey into the outrageous. Thornton, frightened and driven by a laptop, gives a surprisingly nuanced performance, amidst the images he sees of the irrepressibly beautiful Amber Heard. It is true that I am predisposed to director’s cuts. Both Brazil and Batman V Superman benefited greatly from his original vision, marred by shorter run times. Richard Donner’s Superman II flew much better when he shed the myriad jokes. Blade Runner was a more cryptic movie when Ridely Scott re-edited the film, much to the delight of his fans. The same logic applies to Cullen, bringing a compelling story to the screens.
Clairvoyant femme fatale Nicola Six has been living with a dark premonition of her impending death by murder. She begins a love affair with three different men, one of whom she knows will be her murderer. If there is a strange feeling of deja vu, there should be. It stars Heard.
Much has changed in Heard’s life since 2015. She has been in the news twice for stories truer than celluloid. First, she and her partner Johnny Depp apologized for falsifying quarantine papers, second, she divorced Depp with accusations too horrible to repeat. Unwittingly, these stories have been for her performance, adding poignancy, tragedy and encouragement to a performance enhanced by Cullen’s excellent use of coloration. A lean response of “it usually ends very badly with me” betrays the demons that predict the real life Heard. Distraught, Heard never gives less than a seductive performance in every scene.
Black and white televisions set the stage for a third world war. Heard wraps a bandage around the finger of a bully that he knows very well that he cares little for her. Thornton’s writer reads the pages alone, layered light bouncing across her face as he reads the narrative. Cullen is a stylist cut the same color as Michael Mann, London Fields shares many of his cues with Mann’s Manhunter work of the 1980s. There are dark and abandoned corridors loaded with daylight behavior that demonstrate the good and the bad in a room. Every time the characters meet, their bodies separate. Thornton and Heard share many scenes together, but they are always alone. Cinematographer Guillermo Navarro (Desperado, Jackie Brown, Pan’s Labyrinth) walks the fine line between horrific and entertaining, brimming with cool visual cues in concomitant cuts.
However, there is fun behind the mass of bloody fingers. A soundtrack featuring Sia, Nick Cave, Brian Eno, Johnny Nash, Lykke Li, Orchestral Manoeuvers in the Dark, Dire Straits, Apparatjik and The London Philharmonic brings a laid-back collection of songs to the film, ensuring certain levels of tarantino fun. Adding twelve minutes to the runtime, Cullen makes sure that Amis’s convoluted story has more room to breathe and settle. It’s a dazzling display of detail, proving the old aphorism; the director always knows best