I went to see Danny Boyle's science fiction film Sunshine in April. Immediately, I was back on planet Boyle. One of the first images is a canted, off-angle close-up of a white T-shirt and sideways lips. It tracks leftwards and upwards to dark glasses, reflecting an intense orange light. Some reviewers found the film derivative, but here, before questions of genre or story kicked in, was a fresh image. As I watched, I could feel Boyle's passion for pictorial novelty, his belief in the articulacy of imagery. No British director of his generation has held up such a kaleidoscope to life.
Boyle has always done this. Shallow Grave (1994) was influenced by the Coen brothers' Blood Simple (1984), but its final scene—with Ewan McGregor's smiling corpse and Kerry Fox in hysterics while the shot tracks down through the floor to reveal the hidden money—took my breath away. The "Perfect Day" heroin scene in Boyle's next film, Trainspotting (1996), also features McGregor lying on his back; this time the floor opens and he sinks into it as if it were a welcoming coffin. Boyle's zombie movie 28 Days Later (2002)—whose sequel 28 Weeks Later, on which Boyle served as executive producer rather than director, is now in the cinemas—looked like it was photographed through a scrim of grain and video-lines. It broke Steven Spielberg's cardinal rule that photographic grain shouldn't show in cinematic imagery. Yet it was a box office hit, and influenced the look of entertainment cinema thereafter.
Boyle doesn't work alone, of course, and his team of writers, cinematographers and designers must take a bow. They have helped to create both the look of Boyle's films and their fascination with rapture. Boyle has repeatedly said that he's more interested in cinematic vivacity than in realism, and this can be seen in the way his movies want to take off into the air. They are structured like musicals, building up to scenes of choreographed expressivity. A Life Less Ordinary (1997) is full of alchemical moments in which reality melts away and life becomes a song. Its sense of joy seemed dated to many critics, but I loved it. Sunshine's sense of rapture, by contrast, is more modern. In one scene, the space crew is seated in the spaceship's huge observational window. One of them says: "Ladies and gentlemen, Mercury…" They watch, hypnotised, as the small planet crosses the massive burning orb of the sun. The music is trippy. Sunshine's rapture is a post-1990s, ecstasy-inspired one.
So is Boyle unique in British cinema? No. His fondness for heightened drama and his use of stylised dialogue occasionally recall Mike Leigh. In its vivacity and Scottish surrealism, Boyle's early work resembles that of Bill Forsyth, director of Gregory's Girl (1981). Yet his clearest forerunner is another Scottish director, Alexander Mackendrick. The ancestry of Boyle's cinema lies in Mackendrick films such as The Man in the White Suit (1951), The Ladykillers (1955) and Sweet Smell of Success (1957). The first has the magical tone that Boyle modernises; the second is deliciously sharp about friendship (like Trainspotting); and the third's acerbic depiction of metropolitan life anticipates Shallow Grave.
If Boyle has a weakness, it is the way he ends his films. In Sunshine's third act, a deranged character boards the spaceship and starts to kill the crew. As a device, it is hardly new, but that shouldn't mean that it doesn't work. Yet, in my view, it doesn't. Shallow Grave was about how greed kills friendship, so the mayhem of its ending was appropriate. But Sunshine is about a group facing death; its dilemmas are existential. It should have ended, like an Ingmar Bergman movie, on a grace note. 28 Days Later bottles out too. When the infected zombies begin to die, the main characters retire to a farmhouse; their rescue seems imminent. After the film's release, it emerged that a less happy finale had also been shot.
Why hasn't Boyle cracked endings? Hollywood often gets them wrong because it wants to end on a note of high action or optimism; this is probably a factor with Boyle too. Less obvious, perhaps, is the problem of how to resolve a story structured around a series of tent poles. If Boyle films deliver excitement and rapture, how can he top this, or withdraw convincingly? Philosophical codas are one answer. Contemplation, when it follows sensation, is not necessarily a let-down. But Boyle is an optimist; his films are big-hearted. He is reluctant to accept that after a trip there has to be a comedown.
Having said that, I recently watched Millions (2004), the one Boyle film I hadn't previously seen. It is about two young boys who find millions of pounds just as Britain is about to convert to the euro, meaning they have to spend the money sharpish. The opening shots are of the boys on their bikes, whizzing through blurry fields of yellow rapeseed. The cutting is fast, the angle is high, trains whip across the screen. Once again, I was on planet Boyle.
But Millions disproves my point about endings, because it finds seriousness and significance in its last reel, which shows each boy grieving for his dead mother. Truth emerges rather than departs. One final thing: as Millions is a story about a windfall, a miraculous arrival that changes people's lives, it strongly resembles Whisky Galore (1949)—Alexander Mackendrick's first film.
