7. “Prick Up Your Ears” (1987)
Something of a superhero team-up of ’80s Brit talent, Frears’ “Prick Up Your Ears” is an unusually unadorned biopic, also using the device Frears would return to in “Philomena,” of seeing the story through the eyes of an investigating journalist (and indeed basing the screenplay upon that journalist’s book). But in every other way, it’s an edgier, rougher and more experimental film, telling the ultimately tawdry and tragic story of gay playwright Joe Orton (a live-wire Gary Oldman) and his lover Kenneth Halliwell (a sad-eyed, resentful Alfred Molina). From a humble start, Orton soon outstrips the older, apparently more erudite Halliwell in terms of theatrical success and recognition and their relationship devolves into that of a dysfunctional married couple, further stressed by the illegality of open homosexuality at the time. Again, perhaps because of his long background in TV drama, Frears proves his credentials as a great director of actors, drawing excellent performances from his stacked cast (Wallace Shawn as the journalist and Vanessa Redgrave as Orton’s effortlessly patrician, archly ironic literary agent are also terrific in support). But possibly the real animating soul of the film is the screenplay by Alan Bennett. Capturing both the humor and the horror of this strange and sad story, it’s the fragmented and sometimes ferocious approach to what could otherwise be just another rise-and-fall arc that, along with the perfectly contrasting performances from Oldman and Molina, makes “Prick Up Your Ears” such a special mixture: part raucous but deeply insightful Greek tragedy, complete with all that character-is-destiny stuff; part stubbornly grounded kitchen-sink drama.
6. “Dirty Pretty Things” (2002)
Almost all of Frears’ best films are characterized by one or more stunning performances, but his 2002 thriller/immigration drama/romance hybrid might be the one that is most emphatically elevated by a single great turn. While Steven Knight‘s script is typically twisty yet intelligently involved with the street-level London subcultures it deals in (an authenticity that characterizes many of his screenplays), it’s Chiwetel Ejiofor‘s absolutely revelatory performance that sells the film’s hard turns from grounded human drama to genre thriller and back. He plays Okwe, an immigrant living illegally in London, working two undocumented jobs, as a cab driver and a hotel night receptionist, despite the fact that he is a qualified doctor at home in Lagos. He has a very tentative romance with Turkish Muslim asylum seeker Senay (Audrey Tautou), who works as a cleaner in the hotel until forced to take a job in a sweatshop where she is sexually exploited by her boss, while Okwe stumbles across his manager Juan’s (Sergi López) side business: trafficking in organs removed from desperate, undocumented immigrants in return for fake passports and visas. With Benedict Wong and Sophie Okonedo providing strong support, this is a gripping look at a half-world seldom seen onscreen, structured as a thriller. But it’s Ejiofor’s indelible performance as the fundamentally decent Okwe, sleeplessly struggling to keep his moral compass from spinning off its axis while snared in a brutal and inhuman immigration trap, that stays with you longest, and that gives the film its piercingly topical relevance in a 2016 characterized by rising anti-immigrant sentiment on both sides of the Atlantic.
5. “The Hit” (1984)
With a filmography as diverse and variegated as Frears’, it’s hard to talk in terms of outliers, but certainly this early feature scarcely resembles any of his others. Owing a debt to the British gangster film, but taking a leaner, more existential approach, it’s a curiously gripping road trip through the sun-dappled Spanish countryside, one that flirts with a quasi-surrealist vibe at times, but also works as a clever dissection of character dynamics between desperate men with very different takes on mortality. Terence Stamp, never more composed than he mostly is here, plays Willie Parker, erstwhile getaway driver who rats on his boss in court in exchange for a life of protected exile in rural Spain. For 10 years he lives contentedly there, becoming an apparently reformed and cultured man in the process. But then the implacable hitman Braddock (a superb John Hurt) and his twitchy thuggish sidekick Myron (Tim Roth, a perfect mix of callow and vicious) are sent to pick him up. And along with Maggie (Laura Del Sol), the girlfriend of another gangster whom Braddock offs along the way, they embark on a drive to Paris, where the mob boss, and execution, await Willie. But Braddock seems to be having a sort of crisis, which become more pronounced with each encounter he has with the implacable, philosophizing Willie, while Myron’s resolve to play the hard man weakens with the comely Maggie around. Building to a terrifically anticlimactic ending, it’s not as widely seen as some of Frears’ other films, but “The Hit” doesn’t just warrant watching, it rewards rewatching, as its cool, slightly enigmatic tone doesn’t give up all its secrets at once.
4. “My Beautiful Laundrette” (1985)
An early landmark title not just for Frears and writer Hanif Kureishi, but also for star Daniel Day-Lewis and for British powerhouse production company Working Title, “My Beautiful Laundrette” holds up to this day as probably the most satisfying and nuanced of Frears’ British social-issues dramas. The best expression of his recurrent fascination with the very particular ethnic mix in inner-city London in the 1980s, set within the larger context of the omnipresent class struggle that defined Margaret Thatcher’s decade in power, the film is exemplary in how it distills these larger forces and themes into an intimate love story. In this way, Frears avoids the trap he’d fall into a little with “Sammy And Rosie Get Laid” and even arguably with “Dirty Pretty Things,” whereby people become too overtly representative of some social class or ideology to feel like fully realized characters. Instead, here we get a sense of character first as Pakistani Briton Omar Ali (Gordon Warnecke) takes over his uncle’s (Saeed Jaffrey) floundering laundrette business and juggles familial expectations, like a mooted wedding to his cousin Tania (Rita Wolf), with his growing love for childhood friend and onetime racist skinhead Johnny (Day-Lewis). The -isms come thick and fast — racism, sexism, fascism, homophobia — yet “My Beautiful Laundrette” never feels didactic, perhaps because of its kernel of undeniable optimism. Amid all the squalor, race hate and criminality (Omar is also involved, albeit passively, in selling drugs) that gives the story its grit and authenticity, there is an endearing faith that love, even the most socially outcast love, can flourish, and be a kind of redemption.
