Though a quirky feel-good roadtrip movie might not seem like the most obvious choice for Carol Morley, the director behind sad and slightly unknowable films like Dreams of a Life, The Falling, and Out of Blue, it doesn’t take long for Typist Artist Pirate King to show you exactly why she was drawn towards it. This fictionalised biography of real outsider artist Audrey Amiss (played by Monica Dolan) opens on an unsettling nightmare of metallic gloop and TV static, instantly putting us into Audrey’s paranoid schizophrenic headspace and keeping us there until the credits roll. It’s a sometimes effective, sometimes really frustrating and annoying technique, Morley brute-forcing her audience into empathy with an artist who was left by the wayside during her own lifetime.
Though we see the world pretty much exclusively through Audrey’s unreliable lens, our way into this story is through Audrey’s kindly but frazzled social worker Sandra (Kelly Macdonald), dealing with an anxiety issue of her own. Wanting to display her art in a gallery, the London-based Audrey basically tricks Sandra into driving her to the exhibition – the problem being that the gallery is all the way in Sunderland. That Sandra goes along with this is the first of many too-quirky handwaved plot points that pop up in Typist Artist Pirate King (a very twee title that undersells some of this film’s actual grit), but the journey ends up being more compelling than its beginning might suggest.
It’s at its best when Morley plays Audrey’s mental illness – which is rather severe – entirely straight. Imagining that everyone she meets is a figure from her past out to get her, Audrey is erratic, frightened, and off-putting in a way that doesn’t feel varnished or easy, giving Dolan and Macdonald a lot to play with as Sandra tries to calm Audrey down. These moments, particularly one where Audrey mistakes a police officer for her beloved dead dad, or in a cathartic reunion with her estranged sister Dorothy (Gina McKee), can be genuinely touching, which is why it’s so head-spinning when Morley shifts the tone to ‘eccentric’ comedy.
Here, everything becomes much broader and more crowdpleasing in a way that doesn’t feel a good fit for Morley (or Jane Campion, who executive produces) and is actually mostly just annoying. Played as quirk rather than as an honest struggle, Audrey’s illness is much less convincing, which in turn dampens the impact of Dolan’s performance and reminds you of how much stuff doesn’t quite make sense here.
Of course, the confusion is often part of the point, as alienating a point as that may be. We’re looking at reality through a distorted perception, but also an artist’s one, and this latter focus allows for some very pretty shots – even Sunderland looks nice through the lens of DOP Agnes Godard (who also shot Beau Travail, so it should come as no surprise that Typist Artist Pirate King looks great). Despite some valiant efforts, Morley can’t quite marry this point of view with the gentler and sillier tone found in the weaker side of the film, but this is still an intriguingly unconventional biopic that, at is best, puts you face to face with mental illness in a poignantly confrontational way.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 