The Overcoat is a short film, directed by Patrick Myles, based on the famed short story by Russian author Nikolai Gogol, published in 1842.
The film follows the general outlines of the original, more or less updated to the present day. Here, in a pub, a man (Tim Key) relates the comic-tragic tale to a group of friends.
The narrator explains that the hero of the story, Christopher Cobbler [Akaky Akakievitch Bashmachkin in the Gogol work: “bashmak” is a type of shoe], is a proofreader—in “a massive, faceless government building,” according to the film’s notes.
An attractive colleague invites Christopher to her birthday party that same evening, along with a few friends from work. A couple of glasses of something interesting to drink—and it goes to Cobbler’s head. Unfortunately, he still remains more interested in the pristine state of his coat than the flirtatious advances of his workmate. In any event, when he finally leaves the pub, a little tipsy, tragedy strikes! In a darkened street, two thugs rob of him his new overcoat … and punch him in the face for good measure.
The police prove indifferent, skeptical or worse. The same workmate then suggests, “You need to go to the top … the very top.” Without an appointment, the wretched but outraged Cobbler attempts to see a high-level government official.
Cobbler breaks in on this important man, who—naturally—is having a thoroughly unimportant conversation, brandy or whiskey glass in hand, with another official. The lowly proofreader manages to stammer out, “My overcoat was stolen from me—my expensive overcoat.” The official’s secretary is irate: “This is unprecedented.” The “important personage” himself is even more furious: “My dear sir, are you not acquainted with good form and due procedure?” He outlines some complicated bureaucratic process that would lead to the complaint ending up on his secretary’s desk.
When Cobbler mutters something about secretaries being “untrustworthy,” it’s the final straw. The livid “personage” explodes. He screams at the trembling, cowering fellow: “Untrustworthy? Do you know who you are addressing? Do you know in whose office you currently stand? Well, do you?” Cobbler, who has never before faced such verbal abuse, simply faints dead away.
However, that is not apparently the end of Cobbler. An apparition begins to appear in various parts of the city who tries “to tear overcoats off,” including the coat of the very “important personage,” who experiences the appropriate terror at the ghastly, ghostly appearance of his former victim.
Gogol (1809-52) is an important figure in Russian and European literature. The Overcoat is considered to be one of the landmarks in the development of Russian literary realism, which ultimately helped discredit and undermine tsarist society. Whatever Gogol’s own political or social views, which were quite conservative, the work is a scathing indictment of a corrupt, cruel and essentially unsalvageable social order, as well as a criticism of those who absorb and accept its reactionary, inhuman values.
The Overcoat, in its own way, is a classic illustration of the fact that “realism” should not be identified uncritically with the specific trend known as Realism, or Naturalism, i.e., the attempt to reproduce everyday life in fiction. Critics still stumble over this. Gogol’s story cannot be considered “realistic,” we are told, because it includes elements of the surreal, grotesque, even supernatural and because it shifts quite radically in tone. But the story is profoundly realistic in the more important, social and psychological sense.
In a 20-minute film, Myles—an actor trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, a producer and a filmmaker—cannot be expected to bring out all the elements of Gogol’s work, into whose two dozen or so pages are compressed an immensity of insight and numerous alternately amusing and distressing episodes. The film, which has won awards and been screened at various film festivals, tends to emphasize the comic sides of the story at the expense of its darker features.
Detainment is also a short film, about the aftermath of the murder of two-year-old Jamie Bulger from Kirkby, Merseyside, England in February 1993. The arrest and prosecution of two 10-year-old boys, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, became the occasion for an outpouring of law-and-order hysteria from both Conservative and Labour politicians and the media.
The film, directed by Irish-born Vincent Lambe, bases itself entirely on police interview transcripts and records. It is a fictional recreation of the interrogation of the two young boys, who were eventually tried and convicted in an adult court under “Britain's appallingly low age of criminal responsibility,” as the World Socialist Web Site noted in 2000.
Lambe has taken and rearranged portions of the transcripts in a relatively sensitive and compassionate manner. The boys are well played by young actors (Ely Solan as Jon and Leon Hughes as Robert). Their parents also play a role, and some of the scenes are quite disturbing and moving.
Lambe told an interviewer he was prompted to make the film after someone unexpectedly mentioned the Bulger case. “I thought of those two boys,” he said, “who terrified us with their malice all those years ago. I couldn’t understand how two ten year-old boys could commit such a horrific crime.
Presumably, Lambe means that he found it necessary to transform the two “monsters,” as they were painted in the tabloid media, back into actual human beings. Detainment undoubtedly succeeds in doing that.
However, as per the comment above on Gogol and realism, the mere reproduction of events does not necessarily reveal their most important truth. Aside from a few shots of an obviously poverty-stricken region, Lambe’s film does not provide a great deal of insight into the social and psychological processes, including the devastating decay and decline of Britain’s once industrial areas, that made the Bulger murder possible.
A broader, more socially critical outlook is necessary for that. The WSWS, for example, explained that at the time of the killing, Britain’s “media pundits, as always, welcomed any sensational story on which to hang their own right-wing prejudices. … Instead of seeking a social or psychological explanation of why the two young boys had become embroiled in a violent act against a defenceless child, it was considered enough to deem them inherently ‘evil,’” or to argue that “their ‘warped minds’ had tried to emulate” a popular horror movie.
Important details of “Thompson’s and Venables’ backgrounds—which provide at least some insight as to why they ended up attacking young Jamie—were not admitted in evidence.
Lambe’s film is a sincere effort, but it stops short at genuinely countering and rebutting the self-serving banality and filth generated by official public opinion.