British director Richard Ayoade’s excellent new film Submarine starts off in a pretty typical way: There’s the shot of uniformed British high school students in class set to the blunt narration of 15-year-old protagonist Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts). Oliver starts off Submarine like Holden Caulfield begins The Catcher in the Rye, providing little context as if viewers should know his background and suggesting that if they don’t they had better be fast learners. Throw in the big block lettering of the opening credits and the sunset shots of the English countryside, and 10 minutes in Submarine feels like just another off-kilter indie flick, content with being a genre piece and nothing more.
That conclusion couldn’t be further from what Submarine actually is. There are the obligatory hipster references — in a particularly memorable scene, Oliver hands his love interest Jordana Bevan (Yasmin Paige) a stack of his favorite books containing a William Shakespeare play, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye — but on the whole Submarine is a film that takes risky choices in plot and mood to create a uniquely rewarding picture.
The film focuses on Oliver, who has two major obsessions in his life: hooking up with his coolly aloof classmate Jordana and monitoring his parents’ love life. At the start of the movie, viewers learn that Oliver secretly observes his parents’ dimmer switch so he can determine how often they have sex — something they haven’t done in months. When Graham Purvis (Paddy Considine), an ex-boyfriend of Oliver’s mom, moves in next door it only adds to the distress Oliver feels about his parents’ marriage.
Meanwhile, Oliver becomes involved with Jordana in what initially seems like a teenage version of the relationship between Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel’s characters in (500) Days of Summer; Jordana’s idea of a romantic date location is by the harbor docks, and Oliver makes a list of the three essentials of his relationship (“No pet names, no holding hands and no emotions (gay)”). Still, the relationship deviates from cinematic normalcy when Oliver meets Jordana’s family which is, to say the least, dysfunctional.
What makes Submarine excellent as a film — it’s an adaptation of Joe Dunthorne’s 2008 book of the same name — is its pervasive comic relief. Ayoade’s screenplay harnesses the power of socially awkward comedy and milks it for all it’s worth. The plot of the film is dark, — two of the main plotlines deal with adultery and terminal illness — but the narrative effortlessly transitions to humorous moments when scenes become too dark.
Ben Stiller is the executive producer for Submarine, and his brand is clearly visible in Considine’s performance as Graham, a strange New Age disciple who gives speeches about the importance of light and metaphysics. When Graham stands before an audience gyrating his hips and shouting, “I’m a prism! I’m lucid, delicious!” it’s easy to forget that moments earlier the narrative was dealing with topics far more morbid.
Mostly everything involved in Submarine’s production is executed well. Oliver’s father Lloyd (Noah Taylor) performs perfectly as an awkward parent, most notably in a painfully uncomfortable scene where he learns about Oliver’s romance with Jordana and decides to give him advice. Roberts and Paige both deliver exceptional performances as the leads, and the supporting cast is uniformly strong. Alex Turner (of Arctic Monkeys fame) contributes six songs to the soundtrack that can stand on their own and truly enhance the quality of the film. Submarine is a quirky little film that may seem predictable on the surface but is actually far more than meets the eye.
Final Grade: A-