The artist as director

Sam Taylor-Wood takes a turn at conventional filmmaking with "Nowhere Boy"

By Iain Millar | Web only
Published online 3 Nov 09 (Features)

Aaron Johnson as John Lennon in Sam Taylor-Wood's "Nowhere Boy" (Photo: Image.net)

The latest work from the artist Sam Taylor-Wood made its debut in London last week. But it wasn't in a gallery. "Nowhere Boy", a fictionalised biography of the teenage years of Beatles founder John Lennon, was the closing film at the London Film Festival. The story concentrates on a period in the young musician's life when he discovered the truth behind why he had been raised by his aunt, and the bitter-sweet discovery of his mother living a short distance away.

Should The Art Newspaper be writing about "Nowhere Boy" at all? We very rarely review works of art. And, even then, the film is not a work that could conceivably come under the category of the "fine arts". But when an artist with the headline grabbing potential of Ms Taylor Wood makes a work, it's news.

A high-flyer in the YBAs with an impeccable art world pedigree (she recently separated from White Cube head Jay Jopling), and a Turner Prize nominee in 1997, Taylor-Wood has the connections that allow her to try most things that might take her fancy. A quick stint as a would-be pop star? No problem, out comes a version of the Passions' 1981 one-off hit "I'm In Love With a German Film Star", overseen by her friends The Pet Shop Boys. And when film-directing ("conventional" narrative as opposed to artists' film) grabbed her attention, it was with the support of her friend, the late director Anthony Minghella, that she made the coming of age short "Love You More". Unusually for a first short feature, it found itself in the main competition in Cannes.

Of course such cross-overs have a notable history. Steve McQueen's "Hunger" was certainly a recognisable piece of narrative cinema, but wore its "arthouse" sensibilities with both credibility and no self-consciousness—a foray into another category of representation, but still recognisably a key part of the artist's body of work. Julian Schnabel? Maybe here the distinction is clearer. Schnabel's work for cinema stands well back from his career as a painter but, love him or hate him, his paintings are still a considerable draw and the difference is pointed. Even Damien Hirst's adventure in pop, the rabble-rousing collective Fat Les with their football-chant anthem "Vindaloo", was never meant to be taken at all seriously.

Taylor-Wood, it seems, falls between two stools. While her "fine art" work is often deemed to be about family, loss and the ties that wound, this film could, really, have been directed by any competent film-maker. There is no clear artistic statement or proposal at work here.

The most positive critique one can make of such an exercise is that by crossing genres, Taylor-Wood is making a statement about the nature of classification in the visual arts in general. But that would really be very generous indeed. If one can set aside her connections and consequent ability to get her involvement in the project off the ground at all, what we are left with is someone taking on board the studying of a craft. It's a craft she seems to have embraced with competence, at least, and in that she can hold her head up amongst many other journeyman film directors.

If the function of art is to throw the everyday into relief, then "Nowhere Boy" comes nowhere near. (To see Lennon in that context, amid a slew of biographical dramas, best turn to Christopher Munch's 1991 film "The Hours and the Times", an unsettling take on the Beatle's relationship with manager Brian Epstein). Taylor-Wood's film's most powerful device is in the portrayal of the relationship between Lennon's Aunt Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas) and his mother Julia (Anne-Marie Duff). But their eye-catching performances seem in spite of, not because of, the director's hand. "Nowhere Boy" is a fairly watchable, if hardly outstanding, conventional biographical feature. No star is (re)born here.

"Nowhere Boy" opens in the UK on 25 December, in Australia on 26 December, in New Zealand in February 2010 and in the Netherlands in April 2010.