Starring: Jude Law, Carrie Coon, Charlie Shotwell, Oona Roche, Adeel Akhtar, Anne Reid
Distributor: Roadshow Films
Runtime: 107 mins. Reviewed in Nov 2020
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This Canadian-British drama explores the effect of a job replacement and environment disruption on a supposedly successful marriage. At its core, it highlights the dysfunctionality of a couple’s marriage when a family moves from America to Britain to help the career of an ambitious husband. It won the International Critic’s’ prize at the Deauville American Film Festival in 2020.
Rory (Jude Law) and Allison (Carrie Coon) are a married couple, who show signs of tension in their relationship. Rory is a British commodities-trader, who is totally committed to impressing others around him to try to prove he is successful; Allison trains horses for dressage, and is only moderately comfortable with her marriage. They have a daughter, Sam (Oona Roche), who is a child of Allison’s first husband, and Ben (Charlie Shotwell), a child of their own. Rory is offered a move from America to England which he projects as an advancement. However, he sells himself without being sold, and he accepts a move he desires without fully discussing it with Allison. Rory is a proud, ambitious financier who has a taste for more than he can afford, and Allison knows it.
The family moves into a lonely, run-down country house in Surrey, UK, that is physically and psychologically very different from their life in Connecticut, US. The new abode, however, looks conspicuously expensive. After the move, their lives unravel. Rory becomes anxious and irritable; Alison engages in rebellious behaviour; Sam becomes hostile to her parents and takes to drugs; and Ben slips into withdrawal. Rory is too obsessed with pursuing success to pay proper attention to his family, or to rescue his deteriorating relationship to his wife. Allison grows in her resentment of Rory, and fails to pay heed to the anguish that is obvious in her children.
Members of the family unit realise what is happening to them, but their unhappiness doesn’t engender significant hopes for redress. The movie promotes their understanding of the problems, but points only tentatively to how they might be solved. The film ends by stating that this is a family that still has each other. At one level it tells us significantly that a family should stick together no matter what, but it is not clear this family is going to do that. Reflecting the film’s title, they all occupy a “nest” that holds them, but it is a the nest that could collapse at any time.
The acting is impressive, especially that of Jude Law as Rory, and Carrie Coon as Allison. Both actors excellently convey a relationship that is fracturing. Individual moments directed by Sean Durkin, also compellingly capture the drama of what is unfolding. The tension is evident. It is illustrated when Allison exits suddenly from an evening out with her husband that she knows is important to Rory and his clients, to go dancing on her own; when Allison hides money to pay overdue bills that she hopes Rory won’t be able to find, because she knows he is seriously in debt; and when Rory in an increasingly impersonal way delivers his morning cup of coffee to Allison. Such moments carry a poignancy that exposes a multi-layered set of tensions, which turns the film into a telling cautionary tale. The movie is about a couple, who may never be able to rescue what they once had; or provide proper care for their neglected children. Their house is photographed to mirror the family’s decline. It is an intimidating house that conveys what the people in it have come to feel. The cinematography dramatically creates the moody atmosphere of a house that is seriously in need of repair.
At a social-cultural level, the film comments insightfully on rampant consumerism. Rory is trying to create a way of living he knows he can’t afford to impress those around him to give him what he knows he can’t provide; and Allison feels uncomfortable with a lavish life-style, being surrounded by it, and British society’s encouragement of it. This is a movie that conveys marital, family, and social tensions at multiple levels. It is a film about false ambition, social striving to look better, and marital and parental irresponsibility. And relating to the “nest” that this family has constructed for themselves, the film significantly conveys there is no solution in sight for its likely demise.
Peter W Sheehan
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