Samantha Morton is quoted on IMDB as saying, "My foster mother died and I did not have a relationship with my real parents. I know who they are. It's not upsetting; it's just the way it is. You cannot change things. My childhood isn't an albatross around my neck."
After sitting in an AMC theatre last night, glued to the International premiere of Morton's directorial debut, The Unloved, a screenplay inspired by Morton's own childhood, and after listening to the director herself speak of wanting the film to be "perfect" because she has a "responsibility" to the audience and the time they will spend viewing it -- no one but those who grow up in untenable circumstances speak in this way -- it is hard for me to imagine that this superbly talented actress/writer/director doesn't have something hanging from some part of her body. It may not be an albatross, or even a moderately weighty seabird, but there are lingering creatures dangling somewhere, however invisibly.
If this were not true, Samantha Morton would not have been able to re-create with such exactitude and clarity the internalized realm of a young girl who half-lives between the starkly uncluttered home of her abusive, loving father and the careless recklessness of urban foster care. She would not have understood the long shots of the child walking alone in her tired, dirty knee socks, marching against the backdrop of oppressive brick and grey, smoke stack skies stretching endlessly across the top 7/8ths of the screen. She would not have known the deep comfort a winter's graveyard brings to this same lonely child, or understand so completely how this anaesthetised and unself-pitying girl would have made her own way simply, resolutely, and without tears.
Actresses Molly Windsor (Lucy) and Lauren Socha (Lauren) are alarmingly believable as two awkward foster friends, an eleven- and sixteen-year-old trying to make their way through families and a system that have abandoned and abused them. And Morton lets us know that there, but for the grace of God -- the film opens with a child's reading of Psalm 27, and we are given ample evidence throughout The Unloved of Lucy's hope and faith -- Molly would assuredly follow Lauren into irremediable patterns of petty thievery, prostitution and aerosol euphoria.
That the action takes place through Christmas week, and that neither girl loses herself to the heightened and conventional self-indulgence that holidays tend to bring, helps to highlight the director's point of view. More, the illuminating lights and sounds -- chimes, bells, birds, roaring percussion -- as well as the absence of light and sound -- reflect with quickening accuracy the tragic intensity of the abandoned child.
As Mary and I were leaving the auditorium, I said of Samantha Morton that I would like to adopt her. I also said that this was a film I wanted to write about. A woman ahead of us (as it turned out, a woman belonging to the film's entourage) turned to us, smiled, and said, "Good." In fact, their intention is to take the film into schools and try to make headway there.
The value The Unloved will bring to scores of abused and abandoned children, and to the families who are trying to love them but cannot, is inevitable. And that Samantha Morton -- who trailed behind the crowd self-effacingly, clutching a Kleenex -- is the most equipped person to tell this story, seems also inevitable.
What I worry about, somewhere in the margins, is that those things that do not upset her in her waking life will come back some day and haunt her in her sleep.
