Too Close to Home?

 
Buy Four Lions from Amazon.co.uk

Four Yorkshire-born Muslim men plan a suicide attack on London. Sound familiar? Sound funny? Chris Morris, creator of satirical television series The Day Today, Brass Eye and Jam, upholds his reputation for controversy in this, his directorial debut.

52 commuters died in the 7/7 attacks less than five years ago. In an interview, Morris commented on the impact of this event: 'Suddenly you're not dealing with an amorphous Arab world so much as with British people who have been here quite a long time and who make curry and are a part of the landscape.'[1] Morris takes this jarring realisation and brings it even closer to home, portraying not just British suicide bombers, but British suicide bombers to whom we can relate.

The film's shabby pride of lions is led by Omar (Riz Ahmed), an ordinary family man from Sheffield. It consists of Omar's idiot brother Waj (Kayvan Novak), who records a martyrdom video holding a toy rifle; militant convert Barry (Nigel Lindsay), who wants to create a Muslim army by bombing a mosque; nice but dim Faisal (Adeel Akhtar), who tries to train crows to make suicide attacks; and young rapper Hassan (Arsher Ali), who threatens to blow up a local community meeting with a belt of party poppers. After Omar and Waj - AKA 'Bond and Mr. Bean' - make a tremendous blunder at their terrorist training in Pakistan, the brothers return home and this motley crew hatches its own plot: to blow up the London Marathon.

The lions aren't the only ones to find themselves embroiled in ridiculous situations. Morris and co-writers Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain (The Thick of It, Peep Show) use slapstick, ironic one-liners and blatant displays of idiocy to produce laugh-out-loud moments at the expense of every character - even the police do not escape. This en-masse mockery leaves the viewer in a conflicted position, as Damon Wise (Empire) attests:

It truly gunges up the synapses with so many conflicting emotions . . . that the only thing you can do is give in to its demented logic and laugh, all the while praying that you'll get your moral compass back when this whole thing is over. [2]

Four Lions has, as one would expect, caused ripples of criticism, particularly among the Muslim community and the relatives of suicide-attack victims. Is it morally right to portray the Mujahideen as imbeciles - to enable us to laugh at and identify with them?

When asked if he intended to humanise suicide bombers, Morris explained, 'It's an accidental by-product of being able to see people as ridiculous. Being idiotic, which we all are at times, is quite a levelling thing to do. . . . I don't think it's a bad thing either . . . [when a film] maintains an understanding for the character that it's ridiculing.'[3] Surely it is not right to utterly vilify or venerate any group of people. The inhumane are still human.

This 'understanding' also prevents the film from trivialising terrorism. For all its black humour, the film develops a tragic tone. The normality of the lions reveals the reality of their choice. Omar genuinely believes in the cause, but insists that each lion must choose suicide for himself. Nevertheless, when justifying suicide attacks to his young son and the infantile Waj, he finds himself stretching the truth, and in the face of their instinctual doubts, Omar's certainty falters. Suddenly his life's hope is thrown into question. It is these moments of vulnerability which resonate in the memory after the clever quips have faded, and make it impossible to dismiss these characters as mere stereotypes - comic, evil or otherwise.

[1] Chris Morris, in 'Chris Morris: 'Bin Laden doesn't really do jokes'', Guardian

[2] Damon Wise, 'Sundance 2010: Four Lions blows everyone away', Empire, 24 January 2010

[3] 'A Chris Morris Four Lions video interview', The Medium is Not Enough TV blog

Back