For Queen & Country (1989) – DVD

**½/**** Image B Sound B+
starring Denzel Washington, George Baker, Amanda Redman, Dorian Healy
screenplay by Martin Stellman and Trix Worrell
directed by Martin Stellman

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I've asked it before, and I'll ask it again: what the hell happened to British cinema? I don't just mean that the quality of the images has slipped–the general sense of contemporary life that it championed in the late '70s and '80s has vanished without a trace. Something in the water during the dark days of Thatcher's reign produced blunt, bracing films about subjects that would be demeaned by the tag 'social issues': the great, nimble Stephen Frears/Hanif Kureishi collaborations, for instance, or the brutally frank teleplays of Alan Clarke, demonstrated that you could engage working-class, non-white, and gay realities without looking like Tony Richardson or hiding in Merchant/Ivory denial. To be sure, For Queen & Country isn't in the league of the abovecited examples, and it isn't even very good on its own terms, but even its half-flubbed earnestness was committed enough to make me nostalgic for a cinema that was dedicated and fleet-footed–if not for the economic conditions that made it necessary.

A young Denzel Washington plays Rueben James, a veteran of both Northern Ireland and the Falklands war returning to England for a less embattled life. Little does he know. Arriving at a housing project straight out of Michael Radford's 1984, he finds a Britain rife with poverty and unrest: a maimed comrade of his is perpetually broke, crime is rampant, the police are racist and corrupt, and soon he finds out that his service record means absolutely nothing. Not only as far as getting a job (he's reduced to driving a taxi), but also for the right of citizenship–he's denied a passport under Thatcher's brilliant immigration laws, despite having been wounded on her dubious behalf. He doesn't want to be drawn into the sphere of crime, like one of his friends, or into violent radicalism, like another, and he's rather keen to hold onto the gun-shy girlfriend (Amanda Redman), the one positive aspect of his homecoming. But when push comes to shove…

So heavy is the gauntlet the film flings down that you wish it landed with more force. The writing, by director Martin Stellman and Trix Worrell, is simply too concentrated on the "issues" to bring them to life, reeling off the list of indignities in discrete units but unable to support them with their effects on distinctive personalities. Instead, we get obvious stereotypes: Reuben's criminal friend (Bruce Payne) is an action-movie villain who oozes evil when he should occupy a grey zone, while the police (aside from another of our hero's mates) are similarly one-dimensional. The point is not to make the film's heavies more sympathetic but to create real people with motives instead of story directives. Unlike, say, Kureishi's collision of opinions and ethnicities, this film has straw men with signs on them. For Queen & Country's particular urban hell seems less convincing than it had the potential to be with a little style or quirkiness.

Still, those bluntly-stated issues burn in the mind's-eye in a way that they haven't in British cinema (or most other national cinemas) in a long time. There's no attempt to sugarcoat anything–this is not the hip, aestheticized poverty of Trainspotting, but rather a place of anger and despair, where people's options are severely limited and forces beyond their control repeatedly batter their pride. Though its style may be limited and its scripting slack, the film's heart is in the right place, and it bleeds profusely as Rueben James is hit with insult after insult in his quest for stability and respect in a country with none. And contrary to the timid pictures that came after, For Queen & Country tries to overreach its grasp, attempting an intervention that links so many social ills it barely leaves time to tell its story. Against all aesthetic odds, it makes a bid for your attention in ways that most English-language films can't imagine now–whatever its failings, it's not a piece that holds your hand and tells you everything will be okay if you just believe. It has something a little more concrete in mind.

THE DVD
MGM's For Queen & Country DVD is acceptable but no more. The non-anamorphic image (letterboxed at 1.66:1) suffers slightly from a greenish tinge in areas of black and is the victim of enough grain to become a nuisance, if not to the degree that it causes serious visual discomfort. The Dolby 2.0 mono sound is similarly mediocre, slightly muffled and lacking potency–though again, it's merely somewhat below par. The only extra is the film's trailer.

105 minutes; R; 1.66:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 2.0 (Mono); CC; English, French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-5; Region One; MGM