Big Ed's in town. It was only 500 months or so ago that Big Ed suggested I read

Alexander Trocchi's beat-generation novel about heroin and pinball addiction, Cain's Book, a welcome relief from my study of Spenser's Faerie Queene, so now it seemed only right and proper that we celebrate Big Ed's visit by barreling down to The Mayan to check out YOUNG ADAM, a movie based on one of Trocchi's other novels. Frosty tagged along because she'd heard that Ewan McGregor reveals his "Jedi schlong."

What a disappointment for all of us! It would be crass and tasteless to comment on Ewan's McGregor's anatomy, but I have every right to rail against David Mackenzie's beautified presentation of Trocchi's grim vision. Yes, it's true, the settings are bleak, the characters bitter, the sex abusive and joyless. Yes, the story steeps us in sin and guilt and pain and unrelenting despair. Yes, there is absolutely no sense of hope or redemption at the end. All this would be wonderful, just my cup of tea, but Mackenzie ruins it by using special lighting, colored lenses, fuzzy focusing, and other cinematographer's tricks to give the grimy industrial settings a picture-postcard prettiness, and also by saturating us with inappropriately sweet, sad, romantically melancholy violin music for the entire 99 minutes.

Scenes during which Joe (Ewan McGregor's character) has his grunting, brutish way with Ella (Tilda Swinton) or Cathie (Emily Mortimer) are inserted to provide priapic relief between longer scenes during which Joe glares at the world in pain-drenched silence. This alternation of the hurt but defiant Joe with Joe the crazed animal in rut becomes more and more annoying because Mackenzie persists in doing it with clockwork regularity for most of the film.

There are some famous food-and-sex scenes in the movies, perhaps the most celebrated being the one in TOM JONES when Albert Finney and a tavern wench tear apart a roast chicken and lecherously suck the juicy, tender meat from the bones.  Apparently Mackenzie had aspirations of joining the legends, but his efforts backfired badly. By far the worst scene in YOUNG ADAM is one in which Cathie comes home from a hard day at work and bitches at Joe because all he's made for supper is a bowl of custard. Joe loses his temper and hurls the bowl at her, soaking her with slimy yellow goop, then knocks her to the floor and shakes ketchup, brown sauce, and sugar across her back, a wildly inspired Jackson Pollock of domestic abuse. Having emptied the pantry, Joe concludes his temper tantrum by dropping to his knees and raping Cathie dogstyle.  

This ill-conceived scene is meant to show how Joe, a sensitive literary artist tormented by life and frustrated by writer's block, can sometimes lose control and vent his anguish in acts of violence, but unfortunately, the visual effect is so contrived and pretentious, not to mention silly, that it was hard for me not to laugh. And that pretty much sums up the rest of YOUNG ADAM too – contrived, pretentious, and silly.