London Fields: Director’s Cut

London Fields is awash with controversy. Since 2001, writers and directors have longed to bring the prose of Martin Amis to the big screen. When it was ready for release in 2015, director Matthew Cullen sued the producer for using a cut he didn’t support. Barring from a festival standpoint, the film was finally released in 2018, where it became a critical bombshell. Whatever your opinion of Rotten Tomatoes as a system, setting a 0% rating shows that something went very, very wrong along the way.
And it didn’t have to be that way. Looking at Cullen’s vision, there’s a measured image of neo-noir nihilism at play here, detailing the turmoil and tyrannies suffered by Billy’s anguished writer Bob Thornton, through a kaleidoscope of psychedelic imagery. A spaceship looms over Johnny Nash’s single I Can See Clearly Now, juxtaposing a cylindrical journey into the outlandish. Thornton, scared and with his laptop, gives a surprisingly nuanced performance, among the images he sees of the irrepressibly beautiful Amber Heard. Admittedly, I’m predisposed to director’s cuts. Both Brazil and Batman V Superman benefited greatly from the original vision for him, marred by shorter runtimes. Richard Donner’s Superman II flew much better when he shed the myriad jokes. Blade Runner was a more cryptic film when Ridely Scott re-edited the film, much to the delight of his fans. The same logic applies to Cullen, bringing a compelling story to screens.
Clairvoyant femme fatale Nicola Six has been living with a dark premonition of her impending death by murder. She begins a love affair with three different men, one of whom she knows will be her killer. If there’s a weird feeling of déjà vu, there should be. It stars Heard.
A lot has changed in Heard’s life since 2015. She has been in the news twice for stories truer than celluloid. First, she and her partner Johnny Depp apologized for falsifying quarantine documents, second, she divorced Depp on accusations too horrifying to repeat. Unintentional, these stories have been for her performance, they add pathos, tragedy, and exhilaration to a performance enhanced by Cullen’s excellent use of coloration. A svelte response of “it usually ends very badly for me” betrays the real-life predicting demons Heard. Distraught, Heard never delivers less than a seductive performance in every scene.
Black and white televisions set the stage for a third world war. Heard wraps a bandage around the finger of a thug who he knows full well cares little for her. Thornton’s writer reads the pages alone, layered light jumping over her face as he reads the narrative. Cullen is a stylist cut in the same color as Michael Mann, London Fields shares many of his cues with Mann Manhunter’s 1980s oeuvre. There are dark, abandoned hallways loaded with daylight behavior that demonstrate the good and bad in a room. Every time the characters meet, their bodies are separated. Thornton and Heard share many scenes together, but they are always alone. Cinematographer Guillermo Navarro (Desperado, Jackie Brown, Pan’s Labyrinth) walks the fine line between gruesome and entertaining, brimming with brilliant visual cues in accompanying cuts.
However, there is fun behind the mass of bloody fingers. A soundtrack featuring Sia, Nick Cave, Brian Eno, Johnny Nash, Lykke Li, Orchestral Manoeuvers in the Dark, Dire Straits, Apparatjik and The London Philharmonic bring a collection of laid-back songs to the film, ensuring certain levels of Tarantino fun. By adding twelve minutes to the running time, Cullen ensures that Amis’ convoluted story is given more room to breathe and settle. It is a dazzling display of detail, proving the ancient aphorism; the director always knows best