Who the Hell is the Big Bad Wolf?

#19--21: The Red Riding Trilogy

Made for broadcast TV in Britain, these films are fictionalizations of a string of real murders in working class Yorkshire--dubbed the "Yorkshire Ripper" cases at three separate moments: 1974, 1980, and 1983. The films present a story of murder, mystery, police corruption, strange and creepy clergy, and a sketchy land deal to build an American-style mall all set against a rather desperate and bleak backdrop of northern England. So bleak, in fact, that in the 1974 episode the protagonist tries to convince the mother of a missing girl to run away with him to London, where the sun shines. It is enough to say that the plot line is convoluted.

The mysteries in the three episodes are tangentially connected but the attempts to wind them up in the final episode is only partially successful. Because I watched all three films end to end, I really felt the films they could have benefited from a good, brutal, edit. The films lack discipline and pacing. This might be less problematic on TV (when you are blogging, eating, and watching a film all at once a little lethargy in the pacing is easy to miss), but in the theater the scenes tend to drag on and on.

That aside, the mystery is compelling. Each piece has a different director (1980 is directed by James Marsh--the Oscar winning director of Man On Wire) and marginally different atmospheres, although the reviews that suggest dramatic differences in style are overstated. In the end, the differences are more like differences between TV dramas filmed on fading 1970's film stock rather that individualistic stylistic choices.

The most interesting part of the triptych, in my opinion, is the Red Riding Hood thread. At various points, the comparison is quite broad. For example, in the 1983 story the man who may have been falsely convicted of the 1974 crimes refers to the murderer as "the wolf" and Red Riding is clearly a reference to the blood-stained East Riding of Yorkshire where the film takes place. These moments are disappointing. The real question here is what is the wolf? Is it the crooked cops? The greedy and entitled developers? The inner demons that haunt even the most prim among us? The monster that lurks around the schools? In the end, it is the desperation of the people, trapped in their poverty and their isolation, amidst the rubble of civil society in post-industrial England that makes space for the wolf in the first place.

I'm not sure these films are worth the time, unless one is a fan of the books on which they are based. My favorite was the last but, frankly, it is the least free-standing of the three. In the end, these were probably compelling TV and moderately engaging movie fare.