The Arbor (2010)
You could be forgiven, watching The Arbor, for not quite knowing what it is you are looking at. There are actors, clearly performing scenes, and yet it plainly isn't fiction. So is it a documentary, a mockumentary, something else again? The answer, it turns out, is a clever one.
Clio Barnard's film is a documentary, but one with a striking twist: her actors lip-sync, word for word, to the real recorded interviews of real people. The subject is the late Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar and her troubled daughter Lorraine, and every line you hear is authentic testimony, mouthed on screen by a performer. It is a bold, unusual idea, and I can see precisely why it has earned so much admiration. The concept alone is worth sitting up for.
But there is no getting around it: it left me cold, and worse, it left me drowsy. The very device that makes it distinctive is also, for me, what holds it at arm's length. Because the words are real speech rather than written dialogue, they come out long, halting and drawn-out, delivered in a near-monotone Northern accent by more or less everyone. The overall effect, I am sorry to report, was less hypnotic than soporific. I found myself fighting to keep my eyes open, and not in that pleasantly lulled way where a film is washing over you warmly. More in the way where you are genuinely concerned you might miss something important and equally concerned that missing it might not change much.
It makes for a telling contrast with something like Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank, a film rooted in the same hardscrabble British world, which gripped me precisely because its raw realism pulled me straight in rather than holding me at a studied distance. The sheer cleverness of Barnard's technique kept pushing me back out here, and I think that is the central problem. A formal conceit, however inventive, still has to serve the emotional experience rather than replace it.
I do want to give it its due, because I think it deserves that much. It handles painful, important lives with obvious care. The stories it is telling, of creativity born out of deprivation and of the damage that can pass from one generation to the next, are genuinely worthwhile. Its central idea is inventive enough that I kept waiting for it to click into place and carry me somewhere. I have no doubt it lands hard for viewers on its wavelength. I was simply not one of them.
However much I could appreciate what Barnard was attempting on an intellectual level, I spent most of the running time politely nodding at a film that was doing interesting things without making me feel very much at all. And a film has to do more than earn my respectful nod. It has to earn my attention, my investment, something resembling feeling. The Arbor earned plenty of the first and precious little of the second and third.
Two and a half stars. A bold experiment I wanted to get on with rather more than I actually did.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2010 | Watched: 2026-08-26
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: BFI Player · BFI Player Amazon Channel · BFI Player Apple TV Channel
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: DocAlliance Films · Metrograph · Strand Releasing Amazon Channel
Rent: Amazon Video · Fandango At Home · DocAlliance Films
Buy: Amazon Video · Fandango At Home
Physical: Amazon US
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