When your film is written, directed and starring you, rocking up in person with it is anything but the actions of a journeyman. Throw in the fact the producer is lurking in the shadows on this it’s very first public outing and, well, you better hope it’s good.
Luckily for Paddy Considine and producer Diarmid Scrimshaw, Journeyman is excellent and receives a particularly enthusiastic reaction when it’s revealed Considine started writing the script in Glasgow ten years previous.
The sporting journeyman at the centre of the film is boxer, Matty. In brief, and this is not really a spoiler as it occurs so early, things do not go according to plan for the ageing fighter and a head injury in the ring is the defining event of the narrative. As is the recovery, any recovery…or not. I say sporting as everyone is on a journey of sorts, particularly Jodie Whittaker playing Emma, wife and mother and who arguably the film swings around to a greater extent. Hers is the real exceptional performance and a lesson in acting lots whilst looking like you’re doing bugger all. Journeyman is not a barrel of laughs and in some ways is quite a small film, perhaps even better suited to television, but the harrowing drama from a life-changing event for all concerned is a rich and often grim seam.
In some ways, Journeyman is superficially the anti-Rocky. It’s scrawny, it’s defiantly British and it sure as hell isn’t aspirational. Not unless pissing yourself and putting a baby in a tumble dryer is your aim in life. What it does perhaps share with that film is the very essence of driving to the heart of a man. Driving to all the hearts of all the characters in what is a fine ensemble cast. It’s a boxing film – indeed it features journalist and commentator Steve Bunce who has described real-life catastrophes in the ring – but the conflict is as much internal and intrafamilial as anything requiring gloves.
Considine cuts an interesting and talkative game after the film. Initially, at least he didn’t intend to appear in the film. Revealing he always writes for particular people – Olivia Colman and Peter Mullan in Tyrannosaur, for example – it was only after a degree of confusion he relented and agreed to step up. A difficult choice and one causing no end of consternation: “What happens if we couldn’t get funding with me in the film? What if the money guys said, ‘Not you, Paddy, not you‘”.
Revealing the following to have been a recent inspiration for script rewrites and search for the soul of the film, it’s not hard to see why Considine sees boxing, love it or loathe it, as a way into the soul of man. Both the man in the ring and those without.
An overwhelmingly positive and excitable audience is enthused by a particularly fine if traumatic film and notably interesting creator. Perhaps also slightly excitable having managed to escape the clutches of Beast From The East and slither into a film festival becoming more mental by the hour.
Released nationwide March 30th, 2018.
