Face (1997 Film Review)

1997 BBC Films
Directed by: Antonia Bird; Written by: Ronan Bennett
Starring: Robert Carlyle, Ray Winstone, Steven Waddington, Phil Davis, and Lena Headey
MPAA Rating: R; Running Time: 105 Minutes
The Nicsperiment Score: 7/10

Ray's come far from his protestor roots. He used to march for socialist causes with his mother and girlfriend, but now he's living a life of barely organized crime, bouncing in and out of prison. However, a promising heist offers a way to leave all his troubles behind. A team is assembled, and the heist goes off seemingly without a hitch. There's just one catch: the payout for this heist is far less than the team envisioned. Instead of riding off into the sunset, Ray finds himself stuck in the middle of a team squabble for money that soon turns murderous...and leaves him not knowing who to trust.

Leave it to Antonia Bird. Each of her five films tackles a separate genre, and each challenges its format. For 1997's Face, her heist film, Bird not only deconstructs the genre, but deglamorizes high crime itself. At the hands of another director, Robert Carlyle's Ray would generally be handled one of two ways: as a hyper-cool figure or as a low-life degenerate. Instead, Bird, along with frequent collaborator, Carlyle, craft Ray as a real and fully realized person. Ray has fallen on a life of crime because of bad, lazy decisions and limited options, and it most definitely has not paid. Ray is acted and the film presents him in a way that garners empathy, while not excusing his choices or behavior. His hard-luck crew, among them Ray Winstone, Steven Waddington, and Phil Davis, are also portrayed with the same amount of care (and the film really takes off when one of them finally just shrugs and loses their mind), though Lena Headey's love interest character could have been more fleshed out.

Face does struggle just a bit with structure, as frequent flashbacks to Ray and his mother protesting sometimes feel like they lack context or a connection to what is currently happening in the film. Thankfully, the rest of  Face makes up for this, and culminates in the biggest action sequence Bird ever shot. It's a gonzo climax involving Ray and two others breaking into a police station, and one of the three turning on the other two to go out in an insane blaze of glory versus countless policemen, while Ray and the other attempt to sneak back out unharmed. Face again begs the question, "What could Bird have done with similar material and a major Hollywood budget?" but then again, like the majority of Bird's work, Face is the kind of film Hollywood never makes.