The Red Riding trilogy is such an ambitious undertaking that I’m having a hard time figuring out why I don’t feel inspired to say all that much about it. It’s a set of three self-contained films, boiled down from a series of four novels by David Peace, each one set in a different year and helmed by a different director (although many of the same characters pop up in each movie), all of it adding up to a grim portrait of crime and police corruption in drab, post-industrial Yorkshire. It’s been compared to James Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet and David Simon’s The Wire, and you can see where those comparisons are coming from intellectually — Red Riding has the same sprawling narrative, takes the same dim view of police bureaucrats, and uses crime as an entry point into telling the history of a city. But watching Red Riding doesn’t quite give you the same eye-opening thrill as Ellroy or Simon. Maybe it’s a difference between the American temperament and the British one — Ellroy and Simon have a flair for the epic gesture, the mythic characterization. Red Riding, on the other hand, feels a little small and drab by comparison. But maybe that’s a function of the crabbed, insular Yorkshire setting, where the buildings, the clothes, the landscape and sometimes even the sky all come in various shades of brown. The only thing spectacular in Yorkshire are the crimes: the first film, In the Year of Our Lord 1974 (directed by Julian Jarrold of Becoming Jane fame), follows a callow young crime reporter (Andrew Garfield) as he probes a series of murders of little girls — the most recent victim has been discovered with a pair of swan wings sewn onto her back. Garfield’s prime suspect is a local developer (Sean Bean) planning to build a massive mall, but his investigation is blocked at every turn by the hostile police force.
The Yorkshire Ripper case figures in the second film, In the Year of Our Lord 1980 (directed by Man on Wire’s James Marsh), as Paddy Considine arrives in Yorkshire from the Home Office to assess the local police force’s stalled manhunt — but the crux of the plot turns out to be a woman whose murder appears to have been erroneously attributed to the Ripper. And in the trilogy’s final chapter, In the Year of Our Lord 1983 (directed by Shopgirl’s Anand Tucker), solicitor Mark Addy inadvertently uncovers a massive criminal conspiracy and a gross miscarriage of justice when he agrees to help a convicted child-killer appeal his sentence as a favour to the man’s mother.
The trilogy is studded with fine characterizations — Sean Harris is especially memorable as a wiry Yorkshire cop who’s pretty much the living embodiment of the toast we hear repeatedly throughout the three movies (“Here’s to the North, where we do what we want!”) and David Morrissey gives a patient, expertly modulated performance as a morally compromised police superintendent who slowly emerges in the third film as a man whose conscience is more troubled than it initially appeared. Warren Clarke also makes a strong impression as the Yorkshire police chief Bill Molloy, whose mouth seems to have been frozen by years of dirty deals and ugly interrogations into an inscrutable scowl.
I guess it’s admirable that Red Riding doesn’t try to surprise you with shocking twists — there’s not really much of a mystery to what’s going on or who’s responsible for all the killings — but even as I fear I'm failing to properly recognize these films' very real achievements, I do wish that this nearly five-hour experience added up to something bigger or more visionary. Of course, the Yorkshire of Red Riding is the kind of place where big dreams, and little girls, and unlucky women, all go to die.
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