I often stand on the footbridge above the railway tracks at Montrose station to watch the birds on the Basin. They are still here, I think. One evening recently, after a little trip here or there, I heard the reassuring caws of gulls and crows. But I like the noise most in the autumn when the tired geese spend the night after feeding in the fields. It’s a frightful sound. Even returning after forty years, the views of Montrose would trigger a rush of connection and aliveness and gratitude for the amazing life here. Two films from the Highlands have come our way over the last few months. “The Golden Spurtle,” which I reviewed in September, was a true story about a porridge-making competition. The fictional “Glenrothan” (Lionsgate/Screen Scotland), showing now at the Montrose Playhouse, flows like a slick promotional video for the Caledonian Sleeper.
Donal, a self-important man from a small village in the Highlands, once an inheritor of a two-hundred-year-old distillery, is now the hard-up owner of a blues bar in the shadows of the tracks of the elevated-metro lines in Chicago. He is an authority on blues. His book is “chock full of sex and drugs,” according to a crusty old fly fisherman back home. Donal’s older brother, Sandy, wants help at the distillery. “It’s been almost forty years since you left for America,” he says in his invitation. The blues bar burns down. Donal returns to Scotland with his daughter, Amy, and his granddaughter.
Kicking off the film in “Donal’s Dive Chicago Blues” is canny. It allows a suspicion to form back home of devilish “Gangsters and Al Capone,” roughness, and crime. It sets up a “bluesy piano music” structure to the score (as described by the Playhouse close-captioning). “One Meatball,” the first song played by Amy and Donal in the club, links Chicago’s famed Italian food to the later give away that neither brother can cook. Mid-way through the film, Donal riffs on “Johnny Boy” with a band in the pub; near the end, one of the songs at a cèilidh is “My Heart’s in the Highlands.”
Both female characters, Amy, played by Alexandra Shipp, and Jess, played by Shirley Henderson, illustrate the values of applying effort—Amy as a painter of watercolours and Jess as the whisky maker’s master-distiller. Amy has visited many times before without Donal and has converted a shed in the grounds into an enviable studio. Jess sees through Donal. She believes that he has become entranced—by himself. “So long as you’re the star, Donal”; “Everything is always about you, Donal, eh?”; he is “selfish, conceited, smug.” While both women are given ample screen time, a script rewrite could have been more generous with their personal stories.
But it is Jess who shames Donal into visiting his mother’s grave, thus launching the best scene in the whole movie. He picks bright wildflowers and crouches in front of the headstone outside a locked church and chats to his mum. The scene works because it is authentic. How many of us visit a parent’s grave with a bouquet or a plant and do precisely this? “I miss talking to you, Mum,” he says. “Once you’d gone I never felt safe again.” This line sets his mind free of the present to turn to the moment he left after his mum’s wake. He fought with Sandy then too.
A framed picture of spiteful, thin-lipped, pinstriped Father haunts the chairman’s desk in the scruffy old house. His arms are crossed. Father is to be worshipped and feared. I’m watching you and still capable of using the belt, he seems to say. Later, Donal looks over the distillery. Sandy gestures at a large barrel. Donal is surprised. “A blend?” he asks. “A fine, honest, commercial whisky,” his brother says. “We sell it by the barrel-load.” In a flashback, Father catches teen-age Donal combining single malts. “Are you mixing a blend? Over my dead body…blood sweat and tears have gone into…our whisky.” One didn’t negotiate with Father. His headstone says “His duty was his life.”
The villagers grit their teeth and tolerate Donal. Some people passing the time of day believe that “he’s always been weird.” A rabbit hunter says, “Black sheep, now, eh?” and then calls him the “king of the castle,” which is not meant as a compliment. Donal has no strong desire to change their minds about him. A woman in a mobility scooter appears. “Oh, it’s malevolent Mary,” he says. She scolds him for not coming back to carry his father’s coffin. “Nae brains worth a damn,” she says. Amy asks “when are you going to stop feeling sorry for yourself?”
The matinée audience laughed at various good lines. Sandy bought his brother’s book “in the Oxfam store. It was in the bargain bucket.” Donal tells Amy, “I think I finally burned my bridges with your uncle Sandy.” Amy says her dad is “full o’ mince.” Sandy makes two cups of tea and adds a dram to each. “You can’t run to two teabags?” Donal asks. “Waste not, want not!” Sandy replies.
“Glenrothan” shows Scotland as if to a train driver (driving a slow train on the Kyle of Lochalsh line, say): the camera tends to pan forwards. “Our” loch is filmed at sunrise and at sunset and with the waves rippling and, in a spectacular shot, from the middle of a cloud. Much of the film takes place outside; the locations are outstanding. “I have given my life to this place,” Sandy says. “My duty was my fate. And my fate was my duty.” Amy is less pompous. “I love it here,” she says. “See those mountains? I want to jump out of my skin, I can feel them in my bones.” Describing Montrose in 2026, Jess says, “There was a time when this was more than enough.”
Adam Poole
18th April 2026
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