This Is England - 2007

Directed By: Shane Meadows
Cast: Thomas Turgoose, Stephen Graham, Jo Hartley, Andrew Shim, Vicky McClure, Joseph Gilgun, Perry Benson, George Newton, Frank Harper

Shane Meadows has been quietly carving himself an oeuvre worthy of great recognition for the past ten years. His films include Dean Man’s Shoes and TwentyFourSeven. But with This Is England he has achieved new levels of brilliance.
Set against the backdrop of the early eighties, the Falkland War and a Thatcher’s government. Into this context Meadows introduces Shaun, a small young boy, bullied at school because of his hand me downs and trying to come to terms with the death of his father in the Falklands. This makes Shaun a highly impressionable character and it’s not long before he is taken in by a group skinheads. With the skinheads help Shaun finds an identity over a summer which offered no hope until he meets his new family.
Shane Meadows drew on personal experience for this film, and it shows. The era is perfectly captured with an opening sequence and the settings and environments perfectly express the era of Thatcher’s Britain. To this Meadows adds some incredibly natural performances from Joseph Gilgun (Woody) Andrew Shim (Milky) but the standout is Thomas Turgoose as the young Shaun. Showing the kind of range adult ages search an entire career for, Turgoose draws in the audience and from that point on your can’t help but be engrossed by everything that happens to him. It’s a credit that Turgoose is in almost every scene. Add to this an emotional range that will draw tears from the hardest of cinemagoers and you have one of the finest performances of the year.
Things are great for Shaun and his new friends as they show him the ropes, get him kitted out with Doc Martins and Ben Sherman shirts. Things change however when Combo arrives. Portrayed with a career best performance from Stephen Graham, he gives he characters, essentially a stereotypical racist skinhead, the emotional range bereft of so many of these sorts of characters. His vulnerability, inability to express his emotions and desire for a girl he can’t have given ample motive for his explosive outbursts. One cringing scene, see Combo talking to black skinhead Milky about family. The scene begins harmlessly enough but there is a definite tension under the surface. Finally erupting into the films most violent scene, Combo loses grip of his emotions and unleashes a torrent of violence on his unsuspecting guests. Shaun, forced to watch is horrified and as little knowledge to help him understand such an outburst.
With Meadows superb direction and writing, the film slowly builds to this moment of eruption, the two sides of the skinhead movement, the racists and the non-racists colliding. This is a story real about coming of age. About realising how difficult and dangerous the real world is. For Shaun, whose struggling to come to terms with his fathers death, along with his lonely and beautifully tragic and lonely mother, this the moment his wonderful summer comes crashing down. Up to this point everything had been as if a dream. No longer alone, with friends to ease the pain, and in Combo a surrogate father promising to look after him, Shaun is content and happy. By the end of the film he’s learnt more about life than he may have wanted to at his age.
Meadows has been mildly criticised for essentially telling similar stories, TwentyFourSeven, has the a similar structure and ending, the violence of society destroying everything positive that had been built up, but never has the vision and theme been so clearly explored and in Thomas Turgoose, never had the central character been so engrossing. Either way Meadows is without a question one of British cinema greatest exponents and belongs alongside Ken Loach as one of our greatest realists.
This is England is one of those rare films with gets the adrenalin pumping simply with the purity of cinema, constructed in such a way as to make this a modern day masterpiece. It’s one of the films which will stick in your mind long after you’ve left the cinema and stopped raving about it to everyone you know.

Meadows achieve greatness with his latest film, along with a career best performance from Stephen Graham and a grandstanding debut for Thomas Turgoose. May well be Britain's greatest film of the year.