Charlotte Regan turns nostalgia into neorealism.
Some movies have a clever idea but go about it wrong, whereas Scrapper tells its story of how an estranged child and parent recover their relationship through so many amusing, perfectly scaled, uncynical gestures that it evokes movies of another age. The underclass milieu is familiar from countless British films about pale, harshly accented people subsisting on the dole, except that twelve-year-old Georgie (Lola Campbell) refuses to be pitied. Living alone after her mother has died, she’d rather scrape together the means left to her, using thievery, cadging favors, and fooling schoolteachers and social workers. Georgie resents the sudden, intrusive appearance of her father, Jason (Harris Dickinson), himself a child in his 20s.
The first sign that Scrapper will go right comes from Georgie’s response to the opening epigraph “It takes a village to raise a child.” Georgie’s answer fills the screen: “I can raise myself, thank you.” Her brashness rejects such do-gooder sanctimony — best known from the socialist slogan pushed by an infamous crooked politician — which makes Scrapper a rarity among British films, partial as they often are to the sway of institutional grants and socialized arts funding. Georgie, perhaps a bit like her 29-year-old writer-director Charlotte Regan, boasts of her own perseverance. Before making this feature-film debut with such engaging facility, Regan directed more than 200 low-budget music videos.
Anyone impressed by Jeanne Dielman’s household chores, prostitution, and murder (and the feminist anger beneath the surface) will be relieved by Georgie’s quick-witted resourcefulness. She’s heir to the Our Gang (a.k.a. The Little Rascals) movies in which children operate in their own universe. White kid Georgie, her Muslim best pal Ali (Alin Uzun), and Pakistani Zeph (Ambreen Razia), who fences Georgie’s stolen bikes and parts, pretend to disregard the family unit that they desperately, subconsciously desire.
When daddy Jason poses as a lookout for Georgie’s shenanigans, their pairing recalls The Kid (1921), Charlie Chaplin’s America-set debut feature, which was based on family struggles he remembered from growing up destitute in London slums — experiences Chaplin universalized (not necessarily romanticized). The reunion between ragamuffin Georgie and boyish Jason also recalls Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon from 50 years ago, a movie set during the Great Depression, an exercise in nostalgia. Now, Scrapper takes place in the aftermath of Covid-lockdown misery. Public standards have been demolished, and that deprivation has permeated the unformed morality of the young generation. (Expanding on the same premise as Eddie Murphy’s overlooked Mr. Church, from 2016.) Scrapper’s modern setting depicts the new world disorder in which kids feel no compunction about crime.
This fresh view of the world deserves proper cultural placement: Regan makes the story of a hustling child into a new kind of neorealism, as much as the war-ravaged adolescent stories in Vittorio De Sica’s post-WWII classics Shoeshine and particularly Bicycle Thieves. Not sentimental like Paper Moon, it’s heartfelt yet bracingly contemporary. Last year’s Aftersun caused a minor sensation when elitist reviewers praised Scottish filmmaker Charlotte Wells for her somber, pensive account of the alienation between a teen girl (Frankie Corio) and her widowed father (Paul Mescal). The movie — patterned after the work of poet-diarist Margaret Tait — was crowned best film of the year by the British Film Institute alongside its critics’ poll that championed Jeanne Dielman. Wells consciously sentimentalized the “female gaze,” simultaneous with working-class alienation; it was similar to the way that American Sean Baker appropriated the raucous antisocial welfare class in The Florida Project, evoked by the purple, yellow, and aqua stucco of Georgie’s mixed-race housing project.
Regan deserves credit for avoiding the self-righteousness exhibited by most socially conscious Millennial filmmakers. Her humanism is Scrapper’s best, most distinctive quality — the source of its wit. Georgie and Jason share nonpareil moments of companionship: the father’s shy twist on bedtime storytelling, an outing where they both mock generic lovers “Patrick” and “Sandra” arguing on a train platform. Regan balances her own formal skill with insight; she’s more than an ally or activist. Georgie’s delinquency is short of the fantasized animalism in Beasts of the Southern Wild, and Paul’s frosted blond tips identify his social type — less like Eminem and more like Morrissey’s “Teenage Dad on His Estate.” Best of all, Regan understands the lack of class judgment that Morrissey so movingly proposed.
Scrapper’s naturalism and humanism spark a realization that Mike Leigh is the only great English director who has not made a film from the perspective of an impressionable child. Meantime, with its two postadolescent brothers — played by the young Gary Oldman and Tim Roth — comes the closest. The Safdie brothers who cite Meantime as inspiration should take note of Regan’s good-natured sensitivity. Even when Georgie and Jason are antagonistic, their gentle emotional interplay resists admitting the obvious blessing they are to each other. Scrapper gives its characters decency.
