January 15, 2003

By Johnny Ray Huston

LIKE MANY NOVELISTS , Morvern Callar author Alan Warner struggled to adapt his book into a screenplay and ultimately failed. So Warner passed the task on to director Lynne Ramsay and her collaborator Liana Dognini – a fitting gesture, since his book and Ramsay's film are about a young Scottish woman who takes credit for her dead boyfriend's as-yet-unpublished novel. Though Warner's debut was praised in the U.K. as a standout modern novel along the lines of Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, Ramsay's superior movie proves that the modern novel itself is an archaic form; the same contemporary pop-cult references that remain stagnant and self-conscious on the page come alive on-screen.

First and foremost is the character Morvern's habit of listening to music on headphones. Narrated by Morvern, Warner's book is punctuated by mentions of whatever she's listening to at the time; she's as attentive to her personal soundtrack – or more precisely, to listing it – as, well, an audio-obsessed fanboy. And her taste is surprisingly similar to that of a fanboy around Warner's age.

Ramsay and music supervisor Andrew Cannon take liberties with Warner's musical choices, keeping the Can but replacing the bad '80s Brit obscurities with Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada, two acts that specialize in providing life-as-a-movie ambience for listeners. These sounds fit Ramsay's vision of Morvern as a solitude-craving rave "culture" escapee, as does a sequence in which she crosses a crowded dance floor, headphones on, drowning out the club's bass with the romantic harmonies of the Mamas and the Papas' "Dedicated to the One I Love."

The dedication is from Morvern's boyfriend – the song is on a tape he made her – and in playing the song, she returns it. But Morvern isn't a sentimental heroine. She responds to her boyfriend's suicide by chopping up and burying his body, attaching her name to his writing, and using his funeral money to go on a vacation in Spain. These actions don't make for a sympathetic character, yet Samantha Morton's performance creates one; her Morvern is escaping a bad situation in a nowhere town, by any means necessary.

Cartoon lunar imagery provided the few instances of whimsy in Ramsay's bleak debut, Ratcatcher, and for her follow-up she's cast a lead actor whose face would have been ideal as the moon in a George Méliès silent film. Silent is an important word here: Morton has made a career out of near-mute expressiveness, but Ramsay detoxes the preciousness that has poisoned some of her past performances. Confronted with such a striking physical presence, male directors have responded by infantilizing it. Woody Allen's vision of Morton was as sweet and lowdown as the movie that contained it, and Steven Spielberg pointedly reduced her to an all-knowing near-fetus state in the Dick dystopia of Minority Report. Until now only Alison Maclean has seemed comfortable with Morton's dark-eyed stare, even if her adaptation of Denis Johnson's Jesus's Son centers on the protagonist's utter miscomprehension of it.

In Morvern Callar, Morton sheds all waiflike characteristics; she's bigger and stronger and less prone to smile. Ramsay casts previous nonactor Kathleen McDermott as Morvern's best friend, Lanna, and the pair suit each other. Freckled and pouty, McDermott sometimes recalls a young Sissy Spacek (or a less pampered Gwyneth Paltrow with crooked teeth), and her comparative inexperience sparks the dynamic between the ruminative, restless Morvern and Lanna, who prefers ordinary parties to extraordinary adventure. The chasm between these best friends widens in Spain, where a touristy Lanna welcomes the same party lights in a sunnier climate while Morvern's impulses drop them onto the vast playa without a compass. "We coulda been out clubbing it," Lanna complains. "Instead we're surrounded by donkeys and cactus."

Visually, Morvern Callar is like a photo monograph that attains motion through slow or rapid turning of pages. Working with her regular cinematographer, Alwin H. Kuchler, Ramsay intensifies color schemes and alters the speed of images so that beachside phone booths and supermarket displays attain iconic effect and linger in one's memory. Still, the film's look wouldn't be out of place within U.K. style magazines, and in their more aimless moments, Ramsay's approach and Morvern's story seem shallow. What saves this film from being a mere exercise in style-as-substance – and elevates it over Danny Boyle's hyped film version of Trainspotting – is Ramsay's take on Morvern's story. She's replaced the not entirely convincing motormouth narrator of Warner's book with a woman whose thoughts are partially accessible through music. This is the closest any director's come to capturing a modern experience: navigating the world with speakers plugged into one's ears.