This small British film with a big heart, should be on top of every movie lover’s list. Scrapper is warm, tender, sincere, and very shy about sentimentalizing the father-daughter reunion story.
Debutant director Charlotte Regan’s Scrapper is unlike other films of the genre that we have seen and loved, from Shoojit Sircar’s Piku to Florian Zeller’s The Father. Scrapper is an odd, fey, cranky, capricious dive into a troubled relationship. We are taken deep into the odd bonding between a daughter who has never known a father, and a man who is failed as a father but is eager to learn the ropes of parenting from scratch.
All this would probably create the impression of a grand, dramatic tearjerker. This, Scrapper would hate to be. It is a lean often mean tale told with vinegary shots of humour and irony. The very idea of a 12-year-old parentless girl living on her own with only a friend for family, brims over with potential lugubriousness.
Director Charlotte Regan keeps it sap-free. The fact that the father, Jason, is played by a wonderful young British actor, Harris Dickinson, is just a stroke of luck for this wondrously whimsical work where, for a large part, the child is the father of the man.
Georgie (played with impressive wisdom and wile by Lola Campbell) has lived all alone in her dead mother’s home all her life with only her best friend Ali (Alin Uzun) for company. They both steal bicycles to pay for food. The way Georgie is seen manoeuvring her way through an adult world (not as cruel as is shown in films about parentless children) is a lesson in survival served with the enthusiasm of a streetside foodstall.
I would have appreciated the film more had it avoided the dollops of ditsy animation to drive in the point of the film’s fearsome commitment to steering the father-daughter bonding away from the sentimental route.
It is a gutsy, unorthodox film with both the principal actors bringing a sassy camaraderie to the table. I especially like Harris Dickinson, whom we have seen in completely different avatars in two other remarkable films, Beach Rats and the recent Babygirl. Moving into the Daddy zone, Dickinson’s Jason displays the healthy curiosity of an explorer ready to stumble but unwilling to give up.
Scrapper is a film that derives its strength from its characters’ weaknesses. Hell, no one is perfect. But imperfection is a solid foundation for exploring troubled relationships.
