Control is a bit of a departure for me, in that it’s not a horror movie. It purports to be a biography of Ian Curtis, the late lead singer of Joy Division, based on the biography written by his widow. Like any biography, it ends with the death of the main character, but that’s the point of it. the point is the story that leads up to it.
Control starts us off with Ian Curtis as an adolescent, wearing stolen makeup and dancing around in an inside-out jacket to a David Bowie record. He’s a teenage misfit in a small town, pining for a chance to get away from it and go somewhere interesting and do something exciting, and in the meantime he and his friend visit senior citizens under the pretense of conducting a survey so they can steal pills from the oldsters’ medicine cabinets.
He plays it smart, though, and learns about what he’s taking with a physician’s desk reference. “Side effects include drowsiness, apathy, agitation, and blurred vision. I’m taking two!”
I liked this bit of the movie. it really takes Ian Curtis the legendary mope and makes him a human being, a thrillseeking misfit that people can relate to rather than some dark god of mopey music.
he meets a girl, does some awkward teenage-dork dancing in front of a mirror, that kinda thing. Good times.
and then we skip forward and he’s married to his highschool sweetheart and starting to sing with the band that will become Joy Division, and he’s celebrates his fledgeling celebrity by… having a kid? Well, his eccentricity has been established by this point, so I let it slide.
What cement’s Curtis’ decision to pursue his musical career is a series of medical mishaps – he witnesses an epileptic seizure at his employment-office dayjob, gets diagnosed with the same illness, and then finds out the epileptic job-hunter hat a fatal seizure their first day on the job. With his own mortality staring back at him from a 1970s desk-phone, he becomes firmly committed to making Joy Division a success and leaving more of a mark on the world than a daughter and a scuffed up desk.
This is also where the tension begins, the drama, the conflict, the tragedy, the slow descent to his suicide in 1980. With death-by-seizure always around the next corner, he finds himself torn between being a husband and father in a town he never liked or touring with the hottest band in the whatever-it-was-after-punk-rock-ended. His wife loves it back in their home town and never really sees his fame, she just sees him as the same desk-job misfit she married years ago. when asked about her husband’s status as a celebrity, she says he’s not famous to her because she still washes his underpants.
The musical numbers are okay. Wikipedia cites that they were all performed by the actors themselves rather than overdubbed with actual recordings from the period, so they only sound almost like joy division, so it was a bit disorienting for me at first. I’d see Joy Division on stage, expect to hear Ian Curtis, and hear Sam Riley trying to sing like Ian Curtis. The performances were, I should note, good enough to send me on another Joy Divsion bender, putting the Manchester masters of mope back in heavy rotation on my ipod (they’re always there, but sometimes I play the music more than others).
What really makes this movie is Sam Riley’s facial expressions as Ian Curtis. The movie is sparse on any kind of meaningful dialogue explaining what’s going on in Curtis’ mind and doesn’t delve at all into his aesthetic influences, but that face can convey a thousand flavors of subtle anguish and human misfortune. there’s the exhausting-himself-on-stage face with his half-closed eyes drifting off in different directions, the “oh shit, I’m kind of a rock-star” face before and after gigs, the scooping-elephant-dung-with-a-teaspoon face of having to come home to the house he didn’t want in the town he wants to leave forever and face the wife he married too young and the kid he fathered too soon when he’d rather be off in some exotic foreign city with his cute groupie-mistress.
Overall, no individual element of this movie stands out as great, or even good – they’re just okay. The sum of all it’s parts, though, is something stunningly, heart-breakingly tragic, like watching a man sprout wings, only to discover his legs are made of lead and partially submerged in the concrete of a place he never really wanted to be.
Tags: cocoa puffs, control, ian curtis, joy division, movie, pokemans, post-punk
