There is a lot going on under the surface of Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank and it is a testament to the director’s management of her subject that the film is focused and prickly, instead of muted and insubstantial. Telling a story that will probably be off-hand referenced as the white, British version of Precious, Fish Tankfollows the tumultuous existence of Mia, a 15 yr old delinquent girl living in a British housing project with her estranged little sister, neglectful mother, and her mom’s charming, opportunistic boyfriend(Michael Fassbender).
The film is pensive and harrowing, and occasionally it’s even lonely and elegiac, as if it’s planning Mia’s funeral before she even grows up. I dare confess that there were times I would have gladly stopped watching it, so unsavory and forthright in their honesty are some of Arnold’s scenes and conversations. It takes a lot of bravery to tackle the world of teen poverty, neglect, and sexual abuse without the usual trappings of melodrama. Even Precious leaned heavily on emotional manipulation and calculated uplift to weather the stormy seas of its protagonist’s unfortunate life.
Fish Tank doesn’t feature any mentor characters or charitable individuals showing up to rescue Mia. This is her life, and she’s living it with uncertainty. She’s far older emotionally at 15 then she should be, and certainly older than her mother, who’s still living the irresponsible life of a drugged-out party skank who dances in her underwear while her underage children are smoking and drinking upstairs.
Still, Mia is just a teenager, and there’s so much of life she doesn’t understand not simply because she is young but because all of her experience comes from the dysfunctional microcosm she lives in. She can’t differentiate sex from love, affection from attention, or passion from intensity. She’s bitter, angry and lost and thinks she understands so much that she never sees danger or misfortune staring her in the eyes. Which is probably why Fassbender’s Connor so easily seduces her.
The passages of the film that deal with this older man carrying on an affair with a young, underage girl are, indeed, challenging ones. We see the film from Mia’s eyes however, so the initial outrage is lessened but the tragedy and sadness of it all is magnified. Arnold knows what she is doing here, and she pursues onward, giving Jarvis and Fassbinder scenes together that are emotionally difficult and intensely dramatic. What keeps rising to the surface is the hope that Mia will pull free and find a way to focus the restlessness, the passion for dance, and her own suspicions that her home life is fractured beyond repair.
Katie Jarvis as Mia is so good that it’s easy to assume that she’s just taking her background (she grew up in a similar project, was picked for the film when Arnold witnessed her having a row with her boyfriend, and had a child at 16) and living it out on camera. That’s not how it comes across here. She has real talent. Usually, people who have a real world knowledge of something actually let it prevent them from portraying it credibly onscreen.
Film is never reality, and sometimes we want to inject too many cumbersome details into what will always be, at some level, fantasy. Not Jarvis, who uses her ability for channeling simple, direct emotion to evoke and make sense of her own background, bringing in reference but creating Mia as a whole character. Fassbender is great too. He’s made Connor into a man who feels totally real and grounded, and his disarming air of charm makes it harder to wrap our heads around what he truly is. He doesn’t play a stereotype or a one note expansion of a trait, but a credible person and that somehow makes him all the more sinister.
Fish Tank isn’t an easy film, and Arnold doesn’t try to sell it as a ‘necessary’ one. It exists as what it is, telling with great sympathy and delicacy, a story grounded in reality. It doesn’t argue for itself, but like Mia, boldly strides across the screen just existing. You can take it or leave it, but make no mistake. It’s an effective piece of work.
Rating: 
