On the verge of his sixteenth birthday, Liam has no resources but his essential decency and a scrappy perseverance, and he puts them to work in a stubborn, naive quest to reconstruct his shattered family. Among recent films about troubled teens, only Catherine Breillat's unblinking look at adolescent sex and psychological damage, Fat Girl, can compare with this one for the harshness of its reality and the down-and-dirty skill of its cast. The mission they undertook long ago - the director once said it is "to clarify the lives of ordinary people" - has never seemed clearer, and the unpleasant realities they uncover here strike us with blunt force. The ironically titled Sweet Sixteen is Loach's fourth collaboration with screenwriter and radical lawyer Paul Laverty, and his ninth with cinematographer Barry Ackroyd. As with Trainspotting and some other Scotland-based features, audiences on this side of the Atlantic will be mystified by much of the movie's heavily accented Scots slang (thankfully, we get subtitles), but there's no mistaking the film's commanding tone and atmosphere.
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The dirt under his fingernails is as real as his wary sneer, and when Liam takes a series of bloody beatings with stoic bravery, we get the idea that the kid playing him has been there, too. But Loach's grasp of such stuff has been absolute for three decades, and his young star, a non-professional with the stink of the gutter on him, gives off the kind of real-life vibes that Loach's brand of gritty social realism (and his dark sense of humor) demands.
Here in America, we see plenty of movies combining adolescent terror, neglectful parents and urban danger. Trying to survive on the streets of Greenock, a grim shipbuilding town with a chip on its shoulder, Liam hasn't got much of a chance.
His grandfather (Tommy McKee) is a bad-tempered drunk. Mum's boyfriend, a vicious heroin dealer named Stan (Gary McCormack), smacks him around. His wayward mother (Michelle Coulter) is in jail on drug charges. If the cops don't nip him, the local toughs are bound to. Like previous Loach heroes - the impoverished boy who finds hope training a falcon in Kes, say, or the downtrodden working stiff struggling to shed his past in Riff-Raff - fifteen-year-old Liam (Martin Compston) has plenty of defiant courage, but the odds aren't good. The hero of Ken Loach's Sweet Sixteen is an isolated teenager mired in a gray Scottish slum with only a vague dream of family life to sustain him.
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