Fifteen-year-old Mia lives in a constant state of war with her family and the world around her, without any creative outlet for her considerable energies save a secret love of hip-hop dance. When she meets her party-girl mother’s charming new boyfriend Connor, she is amazed to find he returns her attention and praises her dancing; she comes to believe he might help her start to make sense of her life.
Directed and written by Andrea Arnold
Produced by Nick Laws and Kees Kasander
Cinematography: Robbie Ryan
Edited by Nicolas Chaudeurge
Music by Steel Pulse
Country of origin: United Kingdom
Release dates: 14 May 2009 (Cannes), 11 September 2009 (U.K.)
Running time: 2h 3m
HOW THIS WORKS
To find out where to rent or stream Fish Tank online, visit JustWatch.com and TV.Movie. (Also, a free copy is available on YouTube, with a few minor lapses.) Watch it on your own during the week and then join us for our Zoom conversation Saturday, October 18. A Zoom link will appear on the right of your screen once you RSVP. (NOTE: If you can’t get that link to work, copy and paste it into the search bar of your browser.) First-timers must sign up no later than Friday 10/17 in order to ensure being admitted.
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Whether dormant or erupting, Mia Williams is all volcanic energy. Peers and adults alike must reckon with her. It's not so much that she won't take No for an answer as it is that she scarcely pauses to ask questions or recognize an authority's existence. Director Arnold clearly states her nature with a bravura opening montage, presenting Mia as private dancer and public ruffian alike. Mia stands (or runs) beyond the reach of human connection, a wild child admitting no designs except her own impulses of the moment.
Perhaps this in part is why she's so unguarded and unprepared for her encounter with her hapless mother's boyfriend Connor (Michael Fassbender), even more so than another teenage girl might be. Connection is so foreign to her; first-time actor Katie Jarvis reveals this by expressing Mia's efforts to come out of her shell almost imperceptibly, a mask dissolving by the most minimal of degrees. Her and Connor's escalating flirtations then gain the weight of the inevitable, an impending tragedy not devoid of suspense, and render Fish Tank's conclusion totally convincing.
It's refreshing, nay essential, that when movies tackle themes of women's disempowerment and vulnerability to abuse, women directors should be allowed to lead the way. In Oscar-honored Andrea Arnold, one such woman has emerged. She stands in the line of the great British realists Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, but is positioned to carry their legacy beyond what they've yet to systematically pursue: that women's stories told in full not only safeguard women's position in society but also make clear their resonance across the full range of cultural expression. Mia's world is too blinkered for her even to conceive of such a scope. We who have been sobered by her story however can certainly affirm it without hesitation.
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TRAILER, RATINGS, EXTRAS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_u6pg8fuSB4
Rotten Tomatoes: Tomatometer 91% of 151 reviews
Metacritic: Metascore 81 ("universal acclaim") based on 31 reviews, Must See
Fish Tank had its world premiere at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. It was awarded the Jury Prize, which director Andrea Arnold had previously claimed in 2006 and was to win again in 2016. It also won the 2010 BAFTA for Best British Film. It's currently ranked 65th on the BBC's list of Greatest Films of the 21st Century and 91st on The New York Times's list of the Hundred Best Movies of the 21st Century – both lists, obviously, works in progress.
Fish Tank draws on Arnold's experience being raised on a "council estate" (public housing) in London. Her star first rose to prominence with an Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film, Wasp, in 2005. In September 2013, Arnold was named the New York Film Festival's inaugural Filmmaker in Residence.
Katie Jarvis, who plays Mia, had no prior acting experience. She was cast for the film after one of Arnold's casting assistants saw her arguing with her boyfriend in Tilbury Town railway station, which is the station featured in the film.
BLURBS & ATTITUDES
Near the end, Mia is overcome with hate and on impulse does something shocking, nearly unforgivable. The sequence goes just to the verge of tragedy, but Arnold is too compassionate to deliver the ultimate blow. The final scenes have a transcendent mixture of hope and sadness. I’ve never seen anything like Mia’s final dance, or the leave-taking with her little sister that follows. In Fish Tank, nothing goes right, yet Mia’s fate never seems preordained. Her constant motion might or might not be her salvation, but it keeps you in suspense until the last frame—and beyond. ∞ David Edelstein, Vulture (New York)
What makes the picture feel special is its unflinching honesty and lack of sentimentality or moralizing, along with assured direction and excellent performances. ∞ Leslie Felperin, Variety
Arnold's film is a bold new entry in that long-standing British tradition of disquieting social realism. Like the directors who have defined the genre, she is unflinching in her examination of the British underclass. Yet despite all the despair on display, the director manages to find glimpses of beauty amid the blight in Essex, a London-adjacent landscape dominated by scrubby vacant lots, broken chain-link fences and depressing public housing .... Jarvis gives a startlingly direct performance. She's on screen in nearly every frame, and beautifully navigates the lightning-fast emotional changes behind Mia's fragile and shifting fronts .... As Connor, Michael Fassbender continues a magnificent run of performances. In three roles over the past year he's displayed more range than many actors manage in a career. Here, Arnold requires the actor to find a precise balancing point between fatherly tenderness and predatory sexual menace, never giving away which is motivating him. His great success lies in his ability to convey both in a single action or expression; the measured ambiguity he delivers results in a combination of surprise and inevitability when Connor finally comes into clear focus. ∞ Ian Buckwalter, National Public Radio
Absolute dynamite. ∞ Andrew O'Hehir, Salon
A half-century ago, "kitchen sink realism" began its harsh existence on the British stage and then migrated to the screen where, over the years, the genre has taken up permanent residence, maturing into a gritty art ... Now add Andrea Arnold to the directors' list and Fish Tank to the kitchen. It's classic low-rent realism – you can almost smell the grease on the unwashed dishes. ∞ Rick Groen, Toronto Globe and Mail
A remarkable downer-upper paradox: a bruising tale of teenage resilience, honest and emotionally complicated and alive. ∞ Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Katie Jarvis so completely captures the innocence, cynicism and rage of a child of poverty and divorce on the edge of adulthood that it feels as if you are spying on Mia, so achingly real, so tangible does her world seem here .... Though you can feel the heat of her anger, and the pain of her disappointments, it is the shots of Mia alone that linger. In a scene that runs through the film, she has broken into a boarded-up apartment, its windows overlooking the despair below. It’s where she dances, headphones dangling, moving slowly to music only she can hear. It says everything about her isolation and her still-flickering sense of hope. It is moments like these that leave you as desperate as that 15-year-old to fan that flame. ∞ Betsy Sharkey, Los Angeles Times
Fish Tank may begin as a patch of lower-class chaos, but it turns into a commanding, emotionally satisfying movie, comparable to such youth-in-trouble classics as The 400 Blows. ∞ David Denby, The New Yorker
A trained actor might have taken care to sort out and communicate Mia’s emotions, giving the audience a clear perspective on the girl’s inner life. Instead, Ms. Jarvis’s tentative, sometimes opaque self-presentation registers the crucial fact about Mia, which is her confusion. She is a puzzle to herself, unable to understand, much less control, her fury, her desire or her fear. When she dances alone in an empty apartment, she is not exactly at peace, but at least in a state of cease-fire in her ongoing war with herself and everything else .... The movie is Mia’s, whose life is too much for her to handle but who must learn to manage it anyway. Whether she will succeed is a big question, of course, but Ms. Jarvis’s triumph, and Ms. Arnold’s, are hardly in doubt. ∞ A.O. Scott, New York Times
