Submarine - quirky

Here's a quirky film. That's quirky in a good way rather than a Zooey Deschanel 'look everyone I've got it wrong again' irritating quirky.  Set in rural Wales and following the confusing young life of Oliver Tate, 'Submarine' is a story in the mould of Adrian Mole, told from the confused point of view of the adolescent lead as he discovers he knows much more than he thought he did about some things while hardly as much as he should about others.

Oliver is a 13/14/15 (it isn't clear) year-old school kid in an idyllic part of rural Wales who is cursed with the need to over-analyse everything that happens in his life. He makes lists of things and feels compelled to intervene in what he perceives to be his parents' marital problems. He is helplessly attracted to the distant Jordana in his school, but is unable to work out first how to connect to her and then how to get her to have sex with him. After he succeeds on both these fronts, it's clear he has no idea what's expected of him next. When Jordana reveals that her mother is terminally ill, Oliver's idealistic view of how things should be is torn away by having to face the way things really are.

This is a film that does the simple things well. Like telling the story of how a wide-eyed adolescent might struggle to understand how his parents' apparent lack of enthusiasm for love and life is simply a factor of getting old. It's a film that tells us how pragmatism becomes more important than idealism as you age, but it manages to remain funny while doing so. Oliver's nutcase mate Chips has a few brilliantly quotable lines along with pearls of misplaced teenage certainty that Oliver himself comes out with. It's set in Wales but at no point plays on the foibles of that region for comedy, so it's a story for all of us. All this plus a decent cast (Sally Hawkins and Paddy Considine are solid British film actors that need to get their chance to break into the American mainstream at some point surely?) make Submarine an extremely enjoyable and tender film.