It has been 21 years since “The Football Factory” was released. If we take “Marching Powder”, showing now at the Montrose Playhouse, at face value, nothing about the business of football hooliganism has changed.
The new movie feels like a belated sequel. The plot has two main story arcs: a troubled relationship between a couple who became middle aged together, and cocaine-fuelled extreme antisocial violence (the “marching powder” of the title). It is the second of these which is more interesting by far and provides all of the forward propulsion for the movie.
Danny Dyer reprises his earlier role, playing Jack Jones, who freeloads off his father-in-law by living in a suburban property and allowing private school fees for his son to be paid. He appears only interested in football, pornography and cocaine. Said father-in-law (played by Geoff Bell as an utterly irredeemable, loveless, nasty piece of work) threatens Jack with eviction if he doesn’t play ball. Evidently Jack is not remotely worthy as husband for his daughter (Dani) or father for his grandson.
The “rom-com” part (Jack’s marriage to Dani, their son, the overbearing father in law, and Dani’s brother Kenny Boy who suffers from severe psychiatric illness) covers familiar ground: court-enforced counselling, burned bridges and failed ambitions. It is honestly nothing special. This is after all a very crowded field. That said, Stephanie Leonidas, who plays Dani, is convincing as someone who is conflicted – at once heart and head, love and logic, lust and faithfulness.
It is the hooliganism and violence, and what fuels it, which makes the film both interesting and often funny. Take a very clever scene early on when two rival sets of fans meet (apparently the appropriate noun is “firm”). During the scene, a blow by blow commentary of the fight between the firms is delivered off-camera in the style of football pundits. Tellingly none of the scenes of football matches actually involve footballers or images of the games. After all, this isn’t the point. The point is to take cocaine and then, empowered, fight, mostly with fists but occasionally with a knife or two.
Like “The Football Factory”, the courageous part of the storytelling concerns the centrality of huge amounts of cocaine to this whole spectacle. How else would the members of the firm be able to randomly set upon rivals on streets around football pitches, in surburban neighbourhoods or even in shopping malls, with the police not far away and cameras everywhere? How could they behave like this, knowing that the broken face will have to be explained at work on Monday, or to a child at home? The film doesn’t judge the behaviour. Instead it carefully lays out the sequence (boredom leads to cocaine then to fighting and finally to belonging) for us to make our own minds up. It is ambiguous.
To say that Danny Dyer commands his scenes underestimates the incredible charisma of his performance. Take an exquisitely shot scene in a coffee shop in posh Shoreditch, in east-central London. He has taken a job as a barista to keep his probation officer happy. He is the Gen X’er who snarls at the Millennial customers (“entitled children”) and then joins another staff member to beat them all up. His asides to the camera throughout the movie are (mostly) very funny and all his lines are delivered with a timing reminiscent of Sean Connery’s Bond. He makes something which is not easy to achieve seem completely effortless.
But his reach as an actor goes much further than pitch-perfect timing and the famous EastEnders London-geezer accent: he commands the scenes in which he does not appear. For instance late in the film there is a great scene where Dani has enrolled in an art class. Jack’s shadow has been cast over the whole scene: of all the things she could have chosen as her subject for her painting, she chose him. And then finally he appears at the end of the scene, drunk, high and disheveled, and we find that we have been secretly hoping that he will.
There is a great deal of talk in modern political life about the dangers of “toxic masculinity.” But perhaps this doesn’t just ferment in the bedroom watching YouTube. “Marching Powder” is concerned with both meanings of toxicity – what happens to the body after ingesting huge amounts of a powerful chemical toxin, and the way in which this impacts other people around the users (toxic in the sense of, say, a hazardous waste spill). And as for the “masculinity” part: the members of the firm are always men.
If you do not like violence, a lot of swearing, and quite extraordinary levels of drug use then don’t go to see the movie. It has an 18-rating for good reason. I am usually one of those people. But I remember some years ago being spellbound by “The Football Factory” and realising that it is showing me something very important which is the link between cocaine and extreme violence. I found myself quite willing to set aside the undoubted prejudice I had about the individuals involved in hooliganism and become open minded enough to hear the truth. Football violence is more of a “drug-thing” not a “class-thing”. (There is even a scene in “Marching Powder” where Jack turns up to fight wearing a suit.) I intend to revisit “The Football Factory” in the coming days, even though it is not a prerequisite to “get” the new movie. Just to remind (perhaps a better word would be “depress”) myself that the toxic story has not changed.
8th March
Adam Poole
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