When Hope's Out, Try Pluck

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

He's a piece of work, our Liam. As played by a nonactor named Martin Compston, he's not exactly handsome, but there's something about his spirit--wit and energy and an often comical inventiveness. Given a break or two, he could have become, you imagine, one of those rough-hewn entrepreneurs whose rags-to-riches stories so enliven capitalism's history.

Unfortunately, no breaks are available in Greenock, a depressed shipbuilding town in Scotland, where all the yards are closed. And for a kid nearing his 16th birthday, Liam has a lot of problems. His beloved mom is in jail for drug dealing. Her boyfriend and father are brutal small-time crooks trying to get Liam to induce her back into the criminal life even before her sentence is up. His refusal leads to a beating--and to dreams of revenge and rescue.

He wants to set her up in a respectable life, which requires more money than he can make selling black-market cigarettes in bars. His brains and hustle attract the attention of the local crime boss. Next thing you know, he's rising fast, if dangerously, in the demimonde.

Sounds dour, doesn't it? But Sweet Sixteen is not a gloomy picture. It's often slyly amusing. Liam, who manages a pizza shop, cottons on to a more lucrative delivery business: a side order of drugs. He has a friend, Pinball, who is comically, often stupidly, out of control and needs a lot of career guidance. Sometimes it's a touching film, especially in the scenes dealing with Liam's sister Chantelle (Annmarie Fulton), a single mom bravely struggling to raise her baby decently in an environment full of crime and beset by hopelessness.

Mostly, though, the film runs on Liam's devilish nerve, as well as our feelings of foreboding on his behalf. As we follow him deeper and deeper into his life of crime, we sense that, smart and daring though he is, he will not be able to resist his own heedlessness, those violent flashes of temper that wipe all clever calculations out of his brain.

Sweet Sixteen may put viewers with a long memory in mind of Ken Loach's fine 1969 film Kes, about another troubled teen contending with a troubled life. It is similarly handsome and similarly lacking in the overt didacticism that has scored many of Loach's later films, not always to their advantage. Its ending will also remind viewers of Truffaut's The 400 Blows--a lonely lad standing on an empty shore, contemplating a young life gone wrong, a future full of bleak ambiguity. But that obvious reference somehow enhances Sweet Sixteen, unselfconsciously connecting it to an honorable and engaging modern screen tradition. Written by Paul Laverty without a wasted or imprecise word, it refuses to sentimentalize Liam or explain him sociologically. It just lets him live--sometimes jauntily, sometimes tormentedly, but always with our sympathies, our doubtless doomed hopes for him, fully engaged. --By Richard Schickel