WASTEMAN – Review by Nadine Whitney
“I’m not built like that.” – Taylor
Cal McMau’s debut feature Wasteman feels like the oxygen is being sucked out of your lungs as it presses the claustrophobic hell of an English prison on to the audience via the beaten down protagonist Taylor (David Jonsson). Incarcerated for thirteen years, Taylor has stayed out of trouble by shrinking himself. His hunched shoulders and heavy-lidded eyes communicate that he wants to be ignored in the overcrowded prison by both other inmates and the screws. Stepping out of line has violent consequences as the opening scene viscerally demonstrates. Shot on someone’s cell phone is an assault where the section’s drug dealers mercilessly beat a prisoner who stole from him. Paul (Alex Hassell) picks up a television and smashes it on the thief’s head. No one tries to stop what is happening, and from the response of the guards, no one really can.
Within the prison purgatory is no attempt to rehabilitate the incarcerated. Lack of funding means that Taylor’s parole is being pushed forward and the only skills he has managed to collect is an ability to cut hair and keep quiet. Another thing Taylor has managed to collect is a serious addiction to the synthetic opiate buprenorphine. Despite his sentence being for manslaughter via the sale of dodgy pills, until Taylor was in prison his use of drugs was recreational.
Nevertheless, a manslaughter charge has made him a “wasteman” to the people he knew on the outside including his ex and his son Adam (Cole Martin) who was just a baby when he was arrested. Taylor wants desperately to get to know his son, but the question is not only if his fourteen-year-old boy will want him in his life, but what kind of man he will be when he’s out.
Taylor’s life inside is complicated by the arrival of a charming but dangerous cellmate. Dee (an excellent Tom Blyth) is a guy who isn’t afraid of anything. By turns friendly with Taylor helping him get in touch with Adam via his phone, then violent when challenged, Dee is a man who knows he can shake up the prison hierarchy, he just needs allies. Whether Taylor wants to be or not, he is drawn into the battle for dominance of the section’s drug trade and is set to be a pawn of Dee’s or of rivals Paul and Gaz’s (Corin Silva). Taylor, having made a connection with Adam via Dee’s gang on the council estate, has more to lose than just his parole chances if he doesn’t co-operate with Dee.
Hunter Adams and Eoin Doran’s script refuses to make Dee a simple antagonist so his relationship with Taylor is one of “loyalty” that’s formed in pressurised circumstances. For these men showing vulnerability is like an animal showing its belly – it engenders a false sense of brotherhood that can turn into a savage bite if not handled delicately. There’s deep pain being covered up by Dee that he’s let Taylor glance. Softness demands a higher price than hardness and Taylor is put in an impossible position where he’s damned whether he acts or not.
Wasteman throws the audience into a synecdoche of manhood at its rawest mode of survival. The prison is filled with “wastemen” – men who have added to the misery of others and find that they can only add more misery inside. Men who form their own hierarchies based on how far they will go to dominate. They’re locked away from society and their humanity; a situation that David Jonsson illuminates through his tormented performance as a man who has to hope he is more than his thirteen-year incarceration and his dulling of his senses.
The performances alone are superlative with Jonsson and Blyth both showing their commitment to disappearing into their roles like chameleons. Cal McMau directs Lorenzo Levrini’s camera to go close and burrow into the psyches of the two men; it’s prodigious work especially as this is McMau’s first feature. Wasteman is a brutal and brilliant dissection of the corrections system and the inevitability of violence in a place where no one is interested in rehabilitation. A stunning piece of British cinema.
