Steve is Ciaran Murphy’s new film. He stars in it and produced it, working with Max Porter as they adapted Porter’s novel Shy into this screenplay. Murphy had already worked with Porter in the stage version of the novel Grief Is The Thing With Feathers, and the short film All Of This Unreal Time. Adapting the two novels required considerable work, as they both used interior monologue, chaotic nonlinear time scales and in the case of Grief, poetry. Shy also mixed in the jumbled memories of previous conversations and confrontations. Shy is played by Jay Lycurgo, who previously worked with Ciaren Murphy on Peaky Blinders, and consecutively follows the events of just 24 hours.
Steve moves the focus away from the initial narrator, Shy, a 16 year old boy living in a corrective school trying to cope with behaviour that other schools could not manage. It is 1996. Shy is a central character, but most of the time we follow Steve, the Head teacher.
Why is Shy there? We are told that “He’s sprayed, snorted, smoked, sworn, stolen, cut, punched, run, jumped, crashed an Escort, smashed up a shop, trashed a house, broken a nose, stabbed his stepdad’s finger.” Already expelled from two schools, his first caution came when he was thirteen, and this may be his last chance, as it is for other boy there. Shy is depressed and confused. His mother also suffers from depression and, it seems, can no longer cope with Shy in her life. This is a desperate time for Shy.
But Steve and his exhausted under-resourced staff are having a hard time coping too. An intrusive film crew arrives, totally insensitive to the febrile atmosphere, the knife edge that too many relationships negotiate, or fail to negotiate. Verbal and physical violence can break out at any time, with fearful possible consequences. An MP arrives trying to engage in conversation with the boys, and win their support in the upcoming General Election – and have it filmed for propaganda. Needless to say this does not go well. In the midst of this Steve seems to be suffering from PTSD after a car crash and resorts to pain killers and alcohol.
This is not an easy film to watch, and it should not be easy. There is so much pain, anger, sadness, despair, fear and confusion, but there are also moments of joy, hope and emotional intelligence, shown by both members of staff and the boys. I remember Hemingway’s definition of courage as ‘grace under pressure’. That rings true to me, and so did this film.
In 1996, when this film is set, I was doing group work in an establishment one rung lower down, in the place young men ended up when all other systems failed; a prison for ‘Serious Young Offenders’, seventeen and eighteen years old, many of them there because their uncontrolled violence had led them to commit GBH, manslaughter or murder. I worked with some of them, with some Warders, and the Prison Chaplian. And I was over whelmed by admiration for so many of them. Not all Warders are brutes, many of them will do whatever they can to help their charges to be rehabilitated, to find hope and purpose in their lives. And many of those young men were determined to do so themselves.
I also came to see that the difference between many of those boys and myself came down to sheer luck. In so many of their lives there came a time, maybe just 10 minutes, when they could no longer cope with the pressures life had brought down on their shoulders. The weight of their pain, anger, confusion and despair leading them to acts of hate and violence. Acts they would regret for the rest of their lives. I am sure that many other people are put under such pressures, I know I one was, but we got through those 10 minutes – or however long they last – not by virtue or moral strength but by luck and having previously been given the support we needed to survive. Given, not deserved. We all deserve it, but not everyone is given it.
The boys and staff portrayed in Steve are heroic. I will write more, later, about the performances, direction, music, camera work and script, but for now it is enough to say that this is a fine film, a grown up film, a Good Thing, a ray of light in the darkness and a beacon of hope in hard times. It is not fun. At times it is properly frightening. It does not have a happy ending, in fact it does not really have an ending at all. The 24 hours are simply over. Another 24 hours will follow. Things will not necessarily get better; in fact they will almost certainly get worse, but for now we have come through and there is hope.
Why hope? Because this is a film about love. Not sentimental love, which is cheap, but about love-in-action, the love we call compassion, and that is always costly. I urge you to see it. We need more films like this. We need more works of art like this. We need more real life examples of the loving endurance portrayed in this movie. My thanks to all involved.
