There are so many good things about Hallam Foe that the feeling of dissatisfaction one feels on leaving the cinema is particularly perplexing.
First and foremost in Hallam Foe’s appeal is Jamie Bell, last seen in a leading role as a 13-year-old in Billy Elliot. Since then there have been minor parts in King Kong (2005) and Jumper (2008), about which the less said the better. In Hallam Foe he has a worthwhile role, and shows himself to have survived his stint as a child actor and carried his talent into maturity. He plays the title character, the sensitive son of a wealthy architect who has become somewhat unhinged by his mother’s death. He develops a rather unsavory skill as a picker of locks and Peeping Tom, goes on to suspect his father’s new wife of murder and then stalks and eventually seduces a woman he sees on a Glasgow street because she looks like his mother.
To some extent, it is Bell’s success in realizing the character of Hallam Foe and his ability to bring his psychosis to life that is the undoing of this film. The problem is that Hallam is just not a very nice boy, and when, midway through the film, director David Mackenzie decides to change tack, swerving drunkenly for psychological thriller to romantic comedy, the mood is just way out of kilter. Mackenzie’s attempt to turn Hallam’s paranoia against his stepmother and his systematic prying into the life of a young woman to fulfill ill-defined Oedipal longings into something of a lark comes off as more queasy than quirky.
This change of direction wrong-foots Bell and sends Sophia Myles, who plays Kate Breck, the object of Hallam’s infatuation, reeling, the underpinnings of her character knocked out from under her. Myles conveys a lovely combination of toughness and vulnerability in the first half of the film, but both these qualities are stretched to breaking point when stalker turns lover after a rude uncovering of Hallam’s unsavory pastime of watching Kate her in her bedroom through the skylight. This plays off against a subplot, never quite fully realized between Hallam and Kate’s occasional lover, Alasdair. Hallam tries to blackmail Alasdair, who sets up a scenario in which Hallam, in his role as Peeping Tom, is made to watch him have sex with Kate. Mid-coitus, Alasdair looks up to the skylight behind which he knows Hallam is hiding and gives him the finger.
These dark themes of sexual need and exploitation drive the film along at a steady pace and are given context by a couple of lovely cameos by Maurice Roeves and Ewen Bremner as less-than-lovable below-stairs types in the hotel at which Hallam works. Claire Forlani is wonderful as Hallam’s stepmother, full of dignity but not above turning vicious when her position is threatened — there is a hint, if nothing more, that she would be capable of murder.
One gets the idea that Mackenzie wants to make a neat little knot from the two strands of Hallam’s relationships with Kate and his stepmother, but instead these two strands slip through his hands and wander off in separate directions. To solve the problem, Mackenzie opts for the easy payoff of a romantic comedy, and even this is handled with delicacy, but by this point the film is going in too many directions at once.
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