The gang's all here

THE DEBT COLLECTOR (18) Anthony Neilson is another newcomer to cinema from an eyecatching career in brattish British theatre. In his biggest stage hit a porn director defecates for the sexual pleasure of the gent who censored her film, so The Debt Collector was never going to be My Fair Lady. In fact, it explores mob justice: the eye- for-an-eye code which forbids, for example, Myra Hindley's release on the grounds that the punishment shouldn't just fit the crime, but replicate it.

In Neilson's picture, Billy Connolly plays Nicky Dryden. Once upon a long ago, Dryden was the kind of debt collector my local council must wish it could employ: if you didn't pay up, he'd play headbutt- the-flickknife with your family. This charmless life was scotched when Dryden's nemesis, Ken Stott's copper Keltie, banged him up. Twenty years later, a recently-released Dryden is the darling of Edinburgh's art scene, until Keltie - no culture vulture he - gatecrashes opening night at the gallery to swear to his erstwhile prey: "You may have paid your debt to these fine people, Nicky, but your own folk'll be waiting on you."

The ingredients are in place for an inverted revenge drama, as the fanatical Keltie determines never to allow Dryden to live down his savagery in the seventies. Dryden - brought to admirably understated life by Connolly, who throughout seems to bear the weight of most of Lothian on his shoulders - at first rises above the provocation; he has an urbane, middle-class wife, Val, and their pretty Firth of Forth home in which to take refuge. Keltie loiters outside with intent to dispense unwelcome reminders to Mrs Dryden about "the policy" her husband used to practise, while drawing maniacal strength from the sexual and financial jealousy his foe's lifestyle engenders. For Keltie still shares a poky flat with his frail mum (Annette Crosby). He shares tender scenes with her too, which humanise Stott's otherwise reptilian vigilante and, alongside his (however deranged) faith in people's right to be free of crime, buy him much-needed sympathy until Neilson's histrionic finale. So what goes wrong? Well, Dryden retaliates, which instantaneously alters the focus from what happens when a rehabilitated criminal is persecuted to what happens when two dangerous men fight. Which is less interesting, and far less original. The Debt Collector then spirals into melodrama, and characters betray what defined them. Dryden loses his control of what we're dispiritingly encouraged to see as his civilised facade. Keltie's nobility abandons him. Val starts hatching murderous plots. The ensuing carnage, which would make the Jacobeans wince, culminates in a face-off between Dryden and Keltie at the gates of Edinburgh castle. It's night-time: the city winks spectacularly in the background; bagpipes - from the Military Tattoo, which Dryden's just left - skirl on the soundtrack. It's as breathtaking a scene as we Scots will see in the cinema all year, not only thanks to its audaciously epic scope, but because it's explicitly critical of Scotland. ''I wanted to explore that Scottish myth of the worship of the hard man," says Neilson. He does so, both my marrying tourist tartanry and ultra-violence at his finale, and earlier, through the character of Flipper (Iain Robertson), a pluke-faced apprentice psychopath who idolises Dryden and seeks to emulate his life of crime. Robertson brings to the role some of the humanity that illuminated Gillies Mackinnon's Small Faces, a sensitivity which renders the more appalling Flipper's magnetised descent into lawlessness. While Flipper's fate makes a mockery of his ambition, that'd be a harsh judgement on Neilson, whose picture teeters at the lip of self- destruction, but whose ambition almost rescues it. From Stott, Robertson and from Connolly - whose turbulent narrative of class and national acceptance and rejection Dryden's story on one level mirrors, and the director knows it - the film taps excellent performances. Neilson's crime is to forsake his delicate study of reform and forgiveness in favour of schlock, and it's hard - even as one admires The Debt Collector for broaching this political hot-potato, and doing so entertainingly - to forgive him for that.

Copyright 1999
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