The works of Shane Meadows, the pride of England’s Midlands, trend toward both the neorealist and the brutal, whether in the cinema or on television. Cruelty often collides with social portraiture and cultural critique, forcefully yanking back the curtain to show audiences the root cause of ills ranging from petty crime to gang activity to nationalism to actual violence. But there’s a case to make that his latest project, “The Virtues,” a four-chapter limited series streaming on Topic, is both the harshest and most tender enterprise he’s undertaken to date. Credit for that partly goes to content. Chiefly, it’s due the source of Meadows’ inspiration—his own life.
“I only want to talk about this once,” Meadows told The Guardian in 2019. But once is plenty, given the subject matter, where the filmmaker discussed suffering sexual abuse at the age of 9 and the fallout of having his dad falsely imprisoned for a child’s murder. The latter likely caused him trauma enough on its own, but the former left him scarred for life. Combined, these incidents have shaped the whole of his filmography whatever the medium he uses, from “This is England” to “Once Upon a Time in the Midlands” to “The Dead Man’s Shoes,” and especially to “The Virtues,” in which he collaborates for the fifth time with Stephen Graham (or third, depending on if you want to separate “This is England,” the film, from “This is England,” the 3-part series, into four separate entries).
Rather than an unhinged sociopathic English brute, Graham plays Joseph, a painter by trade and alcoholic who tumbles off the wagon when his ex (Juliet Ellis), emigrates to Australia with their son, Shea (Shea Michael-Shaw), and her new partner (Vauxhall Jermaine) in tow. “The Virtues” opens on their last supper, which for Joseph qualifies as a Herculean feat; the air between the adults is cordial but there’s grief between father and son. They eat their dinner. They say their tearful goodbyes. Joseph goes on a bender and then burns through nearly his last dollar buying a ticket to Belfast then Ballybraigh, a town in Louth, where he looks up his estranged sister Anna (Helen Behan).
Anna thinks Joseph is dead. Fed into Ireland’s foster system as children, they haven’t seen or heard from one another in 35 years. When they reunite, she looks quite like she’s seen a ghost, though frankly, a ghost would be more easily comprehended. Joseph meets Anna’s husband Michael (Frank Laverty), their three kids, and Michael’s sister Dinah (Niamh Algar), all proof that she, too, carved out a life for herself, clawing her way to normalcy in the wake of childhood horror; the difference is that she still has her family, and Joseph’s has been sundered. His return home is as much for human connection as for lack of anywhere else to go, and mostly it’s for closure.
Meadows assails Joseph and his audience with grainy home video footage, echoes of a youth spent being shuffled from place to place, ward to ward, and to a horrifying abuse that mirrors the filmmaker’s own. The past is always fuzzed up and more so for people desperate to forget it. It’s perhaps inadvisable for struggling alcoholic to wander back to the land where the defining incident of his life took place, and so long after the fact, certainly not without a guide or without safety precautions. “The Virtues” is about what happens to a person, body and spirit, when subjected to sexual violence, and about what a society where feelings are treated as inconveniences. Don’t tell anyone. Don’t tell them anything. Don’t tell them what went on, or what really happened, because if you do you’ll either get the brush off or you’ll be told it’s all your fault, or that it happened years ago, so what’s the big screaming deal?
The underlying, and up until the last chapter, unspoken tension in “The Virtues” stems from the muzzle the world jams onto survivors—of rape, of parental cruelty, and of teenage pregnancy resolved via adoption. Nobody with authority to protect victims gives a shit about their pain. Joseph, Dinah, and Craigy (Mark O’Halloran), a crew member working for Michael’s construction team, who like Joseph endured sexual abuse as a boy in foster “care,” carry these burdens with them into maturity, each of them in their own ways a mess.
Algar and Graham do terrific work individually, and they’re stellar together. She’s tough as nails, rocking a side buzz as an accent mark, while he aches beneath his reticence. Each sees kin in the other, discovering their unbeknownst common ground after one of Joseph’s late-night benders leads to awkward embarrassment. They’re yearlings, cautiously approaching, not sure what to expect from their encounters; they’re rare moments of sweetness in a series necessarily lacking it.
Graham is the real standout of course, being Meadows’ screen surrogate. This may be the best work of his career, hangdog and injured but ever-clinging to whatever liferaft he can get his hands on. One wrong move could send Joseph tumbling into his despair. Graham has to navigate that uncertainty at all times, and does so with not a single misstep; the performance is true to Joseph’s narrative, and by all accounts Meadows’ as well, honoring not only the filmmaker’s personal anguish but the anguish of survivors everywhere.
“The Virtues” understands that the best chance people like Joseph, Dinah, and Craigy have of finding support is in people who know what they’ve gone through, and until society gets its act together and fully embraces their suffering as its own, they’ve all they got. [A]
