Joel Fry-days: The End We Start From (2023, R)

*Premise spoilers, including one vague spoiler about Joel Fry’s presence in the film*

One morning near the start of Joel Fry-days, I watched the trailers for all his movies to get a feel for them. The End We Start From was definitely one of the ones that piqued my interest the most, even as the trailer left me speculating that there wouldn’t actually be much of Joel Fry in it. A beautiful, brutal, very human film.

An expectant mother gives birth on the day her world turns upside down. London is being hit with torrential flooding, and as soon as she’s discharged from the hospital, the woman, her husband, and their new baby have to get out of the city. They search for safety and shelter across a swiftly changing landscape where people are growing angry and afraid, clinging to what they have.

(Side note: the main character is credited on IMDb simply as the Woman, while all the other characters are credited with a single initial.)

It’s technically a disaster movie, maybe even an apocalypse movie, but it doesn’t exactly feel like that. Instead, it feels like a moving character drama in which one woman struggles to hold onto herself as she fights to keep herself and her baby alive. It’s a climate change film that focuses mainly on the human toll—not just lives lost in the disaster itself, but lives lost, altered, and upended in the aftermath. With people fleeing London in droves, the towns and villages on higher ground are closing their entry roads. There are too many people with too few resources, and there are so many with nowhere to go.

In this sense, one thing I really like about this movie is how it opens on these characters who don’t realize how much their world is about to change. There’s a lot of talk about people who left London too late, those who either couldn’t get out or had nowhere left to turn when they did leave. In the hospital, the Woman is confused to learn that they can’t go home, and her husband R simply tells her, “The whole street’s gone.” It’s a slow realization that this isn’t merely rain, then that it’s not a matter of simply driving north to R’s parents’ house, then that this isn’t just a question of finding somewhere to wait out the floodwaters for the short term. 

The film is directed by Mahalio Belo, who did Requiem (and who cast Joel Fry in the Persuasion adaptation that was taken from us too soon!!) She doesn’t shy away from the bleakness of the story while still capturing beauty and connection. This is a movie that is just so full of human moments, whether it’s the Woman sharing a laugh with another new mother she meets in a shelter, sharing a meal and a dance with a fellow traveler, or breaking down in tears while she’s playing peekaboo with baby Zeb. “Where am I, Zeb?” she asks, trying to maintain her singsongy mommy voice even as she cries. “I don’t know.” Amid all the devastation, we’re shown points of light, both in the Woman’s present and in the sunlit flashes of her memories.

Even though they’re very different films, I found myself reminded a little of Wander Darkly. Both are very grounded depictions of a woman’s extraordinary journey (physical and/or emotional,) both present the central relationship with such a soft intimacy, and both are very exquisitely shot. I can imagine that this one will stick with me for quite a while, much like Wander Darkly has.

Jodie Comer is just excellent as the Woman. Her performance is so real and human, by turns naive, heartbreaking, and hopeful, surprisingly funny in moments and quietly courageous in others. The movie features plenty of other fine British actors, including Nina Sosanya and Mark Strong as R’s parents, Katherine Waterston as the Woman’s new friend in the shelter, and Benedict Cumberbatch as a man whose path briefly crosses with hers.

Joel Fry plays R. In the trailer, the only shots of him seemed to be flashbacks, so while it was clear that he was playing Comer’s lover/spouse, I had my suspicions that he was either 1) dead, and the movie was about her having to move forward on her own or 2) separated from her, and the movie was about her attempt to find her way back to him. One of those is sort of right (for the sake of spoilers, I won’t say which one,) but he’s actually in more of the movie than I expected. While Fry’s role eventually switches over to mainly flashback appearances, the Woman and R are together for about the first 40 minutes of the film. I still would’ve liked more, obviously, but I 100% get why this becomes a story of the Woman trying to keep herself and Zeb safe on her own. And since I’d prepared myself for not much of Fry at all, I consider the amount of screentime we do get from him to be kind of a bonus!

This is such a lovely performance. Sticking with the theme of “characters who don’t realize they’re in the opening of a disaster/apocalypse movie,” R basks in the wonder of being a new father and tells the Woman how amazing she is. When the nurse advises her to try to pee and she’s able to, R beams down at the baby and cries, “She did it!” in a sweet, admiring tone. He’s reassuring as they flee the city and mildly bickers with his dad over whether or not they should have seen this coming. At night, he cuddles with the Woman in his childhood bedroom, and during the day, he makes cute faces while he plays with Zeb.

But as the characters start to realize the enormity of what they’re dealing with, R is hit hard. Although I won’t spoil the details, they’re forced to recalibrate their plan right on the heels of an incredibly traumatic experience for him. Fry does a beautiful job with these scenes: the Woman asking if he wants to talk about it and R admitting he can’t, R sitting in the tub hugging his knees to his chest, R choking back tears as he insists that he can be the one to undertake something risky that directly echoes with the source of his trauma. It’s deeply affecting to watch him go from a kind, gentle rock to a terrified, beaten-down man who thinks he’s failing his family—still kind and gentle, but so battered. Just fantastic work here.

Accent Watch

Southern British English.

Recommend?

In General – Yes. It can be a bit slow at times, in that indie-drama way, but I thought this film was wonderfully done.

Joel Fry – Yes! Even if I was left wanting a lot more of R, Fry turns in such a strong performance here.

Warnings

Strong thematic elements, violence, language, drinking/smoking, and brief sexual content.

 

Dear Hollywood Whitewashers: Ewan McGregor (The Impossible)

This is going back a few years now – The Impossible came out in 2012 – but seeing Tom Holland as the new Spider-Man in Captain America:  Civil War, reminded me of this film, where he played the teenage son of the central family in the film about the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami in Thailand.  Now obviously, Tom Holland isn’t Thai, and neither are the actors playing the rest of the family, including Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor.  However, while it’s fair to acknowledge that the film is specifically about a family of tourists vacationing in Thailand when the tsunami hits, it’s based on the true story of a Spanish family’s experiences.  The film casts white UK actors in the roles, anglicizes the characters’ names, and gives them English accents.

There’s a lot going on here.  The fact that the movie is about a major natural disaster in Asia and doesn’t provide any Asian perspective is a clear issue, and even once the film moved Asian people out of the foreground, focusing instead on tourists, the nationality and complexions of the actual tourist family they were talking about weren’t considered “universal” enough and so we wound up with a white English family instead.  I’ll be looking mainly at the first issue in this post, since that’s the issue Ewan McGregor regrettably tries to discount in this quote: 

“The truth is, it’s a story about this family, this western family, who are on holiday there.  And that story is many, many people’s story.  But to say that it doesn’t tell the Thai people’s stories…  Naomi’s character is saved by a Thai man, and taken to safety in a Thai village where the Thai women dress her.  It’s one of the most moving scenes in the film, really.  In the hospital they’re all Thai nurses and Thai doctors – you see nothing but Thai people saving lives and helping.”

Sigh… I get that actors don’t want to burn any bridges against their studios, and really, when white actors agree to take roles like this, they’re at the very least complicit in what’s going on.  Still, it saddens me when people I like say these sorts of things.  It never, never makes them look anything resembling good.

So, Ewan, I’ll grant you that the story is “many, many people’s story,” in that there were many tourists in Thailand when the tsunami hit.  However, that large number of tourists still pales in comparison to the number of Thai people with their own stories to tell (who probably didn’t get the same priority medical treatment as the injured white tourist.)  It’d be a bit like making a Holocaust film about a Jehovah’s Witness in a concentration camp; yes, some people in concentration camps were Jehovah’s Witnesses there, but the vast majority were not, a fact very widely accepted in Hollywood.  Although, even that story would be preferable to this one, since many films have been made about Jewish people during the Holocaust and so the occasional story about non-Jewish people wouldn’t constitute erasure.  However, there isn’t a wide body of films about the Indian Ocean tsunami that tell the stories of the people principally affected by it, and so, a high-profile movie that tells an outlier story is going to be much more conspicuous.

Because all those Thai people in your movie are serving the white characters’ story.  They’re there for storytelling utility, not as real characters.  None of them have names or fears/struggles of their own that are more than backdrop.  That’s what people mean when they say the film “doesn’t tell the Thai people’s stories,” and to argue otherwise is disingenuous at best.