MOVIE REVIEW | 'THE ARBOR'

A Playwright’s Legacy, Kindled by Addiction and Neglect

By Jeannette Catsoulis
April 26, 2011

Our introduction to “The Arbor,” Clio Barnard’s tightrope-walking experiment with fact, fiction and the spaces in between, is the sight of two mangy curs nosing through trash. Their appearance is our first clue that the leafy green serenity suggested by the film’s title is unlikely to materialize.

Sure enough, within seconds we’re immersed in a sad, sorry tale of terrible choices, brightened not at all by the brief flare of fame. Ostensibly a biopic of the British playwright Andrea Dunbar — whose writing vividly chronicled life on a primarily white and profoundly racist council housing estate in West Yorkshire — this multidimensional collage explodes our expectations of the form.

Manjinder Virk as Andrea Dunbar's daughter Lorraine

But then, Dunbar explodes most people’s idea of a successful playwright. By the time she died — as she had lived, in the pub — in 1990 at the tragically young age of 29, she had had three works performed at the prestigious Royal Court Theater in London (and one made into a film) while producing three children by as many partners. This last accomplishment would be mirrored by her older daughter, Lorraine (sensitively played as an adult by Manjinder Virk), who also inherited her mother’s fondness for addictive substances and abusive men.

Finding its voice in Lorraine’s anguish, “The Arbor” (named for Dunbar’s first play, written as a school assignment when she was just 15) gradually evolves into a lacerating study of generational damage and the legacy of neglect. Wrapping truth in a blanket of artifice, the director uses actors to lip-sync prerecorded interviews with Dunbar’s family and friends, producing an effect that’s at once aggressively theatrical and devastatingly intimate. Viewer and confidante become one as the actors recite their lines directly to the camera, their bodies positioned and lighted to form visual punctuation that pierces more deeply than any faithful re-enactment.

Andrea Dunbar

The technique constantly reminds us that we are watching staged reality, and though the actors flawlessly reproduce every breath and syllable, every halting hum and haw, the disconnect between words and performer brutally exposes the machinery of representation.

At the same time, the anonymity granted to the interviewees (some of whom are seen in excerpts from a 1987 BBC News segment on Dunbar, when she was staying in a hostel for battered wives) seems to loosen their tongues.

What spews forth is a lurid litany of unimaginable suffering, a landscape strewn with dead babies and deadened souls. Its medium, however, is a language so coolly concise (“That were the day our Steven got killed”) and effortlessly colorful (Lorraine describing a former lover as “crack-psychosed”) that the backwash is less depressing than it ought to be. Even so, as Lorraine’s choices double down on those of her mother, the pileup of calamities will propel audiences from the theater with a fuller understanding of the need to self-medicate.

Where “The Arbor” works best is as a meditation on the tricks of memory and the effect of nurturing — or, in this case, a lack of it — on personal judgment. As Lorraine and her sister, Lisa (beautifully embodied by Christine Bottomley), review the same childhood events from polar emotional perspectives, the staginess of the settings makes their disconnect pop. Sharing a frame and little else, one sister reminisces about a mother writing late into the night, while the other recalls only an abusive drunk who “had the audacity to drop dead” (of a brain hemorrhage) five days before Christmas without buying gifts.

Like a Ken Loach drama stripped to bare bones, “The Arbor” springs to life in the bright bitterness of Dunbar’s prose, showcased in alfresco performances of contentious scenes from the play. And at the end, when we hear Lorraine describe estate residents as “going down a big steep hill into a big black hole,” we know that her mother bequeathed more than just hurt, fury and a gift for self-destruction.

The Arbor Opens on Wednesday in Manhattan.

Written and directed by Clio Barnard; director of photography, Ole Bratt Birkeland; edited by Nick Fenton and Daniel Goddard; music by Harry Escott and Molly Nyman; production design by Mat- thew Button; costumes by Matthew Price; produced by Tracy O’Riordan; re- leased by Strand Releasing.

At Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, west of Avenue of the Americas, South Village. In strong Yorkshire dialect, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Christine Bottomley (Lisa), Neil Dudgeon (Steve), Robert Emms (David Dunbar), Natalie Gavin (Andrea Dunbar), Jimmy Mistry (Yousaf ) and Manjinder Virk (Lorraine).

THE NEW YORK TIMES