I swear | Review | The cinema blog

★★★★

Already the subject of three landmark documentaries, including the landmark 1989 BBC short film. John is not crazy – the remarkable and often heartbreaking story of John Davidson is dramatized this week in Kirk Jones’ I swear. All emotions live here. The tears, of joy and despair, are constant. Indeed, it is a film which grabs your heart with astonishing ease and which hardly leaves you any respite. A deeply human script from Jones himself is triumph enough, but it’s the powerful on-camera performances that nail the landing.

Davidson’s role in raising public awareness of Tourette syndrome would ultimately result in him receiving an MBE in 2019, courtesy of the late Queen Elizabeth II. It’s here that the film opens, mining a sick mix of hilarity and agonizing horror for laughs and gasps as Davidson can’t help but release a whiff of betrayal. Immediately, Jones takes us back some four decades to 1983, unaware of everything that is to come. A familiar launching pad for a narrative that finds nuance and individuality in pacing, the film moving into territory less familiar and more rewarding than that usually found in the average biopic.

Scott Ellis Watson plays young John, a painfully promising teenager, who grows up in the Scottish border town of Galashiels. He is sporty, handsome, intelligent and not unlucky with the ladies. There’s talk of a football scholarship – John is a scoring genius – and this speedy player even manages to score a date on his first day of high school. The tics start out relatively subtle, mostly with head shaking, but snowball too quickly. Today? Who knows. In 1983, Tourette’s disease ended for young John. At home, he is chastised by his mother (Shirley Henderson) for “being a fool at the table” and prescribed “a hot bath and an early night.” At school, it’s a belt on the hand and accusations of attention seeking. And that’s just the teachers.

A careful transition transforms the young, hopeful Watson into Robert Aramayo’s more world-beaten John, late 20s, still living with his mother and receiving a heavy dose of superficial but psychologically deadly antipsychotics. A warmer film arises from the introduction of Maxine Peake’s Dotty – by name and character – into John’s life. A mental health nurse by trade and the mother of an old school friend who cares for John, Dotty exudes compassion, allowing John to rediscover the joy in his life. Jones is careful never to laugh at John, but is intelligent enough to allow the funniest side of his outbursts to be shared communally. Cum for milk and all.

The real knock here is the on-point casting. Peake and Henderson make a formidable binary couple, each a complex and sympathetic side of the same coin, ably supporting Aramayo’s flash in the pan’s central turn. No scene resonates as much in I swear like the one in which Aramayo joins another sick young person in the back of a car, allowing her to release every ounce of the verbal tick-tock she struggles to contain. Her parents stand awkwardly nearby as the couple allows themselves to be torn apart. It’s hugely satisfying, gloriously crude and genuinely moving, as much of the film proves. Despite the comedic inflections, Jones cannot resist depicting the abuses of John’s life.

In his latest installment, Jones takes a closer look at the documentary style that inspired the film. An inclusive Tourette’s day – “we are the majority!” » – features real young people living with this disease and embraces the chaos. Meanwhile, hope arises, as a final leap into the future explores the medical advances that are revolutionizing the experience of those still being diagnosed today. It’s extraordinary but it’s far from the end of the story.

T.S.