NORTHERN NOIR

Let faith be my shield and let joy be my steed
‘gainst the dragons of anger, the ogres of greed;
And let me set free with the sword of my youth,
From the castle of darkness, the power of the truth

Rewatching the masterful Red Riding Trilogy (2009) recently, thanks to a friend recommending Mark Fisher's essay on author David Peace, I was reminded of just how poor the overall quality of British television has been for the past ten years or more since Tony Grisoni's excellent adaptation first premiered on Channel 4. Perhaps in all the excitement over Scandi/Nordic Noir, some of us forgot just how brilliant our own 'Northern Noir' was in that brief moment, and now, looking back, it really stands out to me as a rare jewel. I also can't help but feel that the Red Riding Trilogy played some part in influencing the critically acclaimed 2014 HBO series True Detective, especially in its gnostic ambition. However, for me, True Detective fell well short of Red Riding's overall execution, having been undone by its attempt to explain and rationalize its own mystery. Red Riding Trilogy understands, like all great mystery/noir, that it is in that uncertain place where crimes can't always be neatly solved—unlike cozy detective novels—that the true terror and tragedy lies.

You only have to look at the past week in the British press, reporting the litany of crimes Mohamed Al Fayed is alleged to have committed, to see once again that, like Savile, certain people become untouchable for the heinous actions they've committed in their lifetime, so deeply protected by the influence they've bought through fame or finance. Or both.

But it is Andrew Garfield's performance as young crime reporter Eddie Dunford that especially haunted me while watching the series this time around. There's a looseness to his physiology in the performance that perfectly captures the cocky precociousness of youth, which becomes increasingly drained from him as he finds himself further mired in the labyrinthine web of corruption embedded in the West Yorkshire Police Force, working in cahoots with the criminal property developer John Dawson (Sean Bean). Similar to Chinatown's Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson), who finds himself dealing with forces too insidious and too big for conventional justice to punish, Dunford is eventually forced to put aside his original journalistic instinct and replace it with that of an avenging angel—a sort of northern Travis Bickle, albeit without the overt incel insanity of that character.

The tipping point for Eddie in turning from reporter to avenger is his falling in love with Paula Garland (the excellent Rebecca Hall), whom he soon learns is also entangled in the criminal underworld of Dawson and his ilk. By bringing the theme of love into the narrative the personal jeopardy for Eddie increases massively and its dangerous implications for the wider mystery he is trying to uncover.

Garfield plays his role so naturally throughout Red Riding: The Year Of Our Lord 1974 that it seems as authentic as the period clothes he wears and the shaggy 1970s-style hair he's grown for the part. His performance here is far more successful than his role as the jobless, quasi-detective Sam in 2018's Under the Silver Lake, a Chandler-esque noir with a millennial twist, which sadly ended up being horribly uneven. In the more cohesive Red Riding, we feel our own stomachs tighten as the dread of what Eddie is attempting to uncover becomes more illuminated, and the relentless, claustrophobic atmosphere of 1970s Yorkshire smothers us like a heavy blanket as we begin to realise, like Eddie, that this story will not have a happy ending. Our sympathies are so locked into our protagonist that we feel the depths of his pain and loss of innocence as if it were our own. I'm truly surprised that Garfield didn't get a BAFTA for his work here, which I believe is still his most accomplished performance to date.