After a celebrated acting career (most notably his key role in HBO’s Succession), Brian Cox takes to the director’s seat for the very first time with Glenrothan.
Written by David Ashton (who previously collaborated with Cox in the world of radio), the film revolves around two Scottish brothers separated by the Atlantic and forty years of animosity. Alan Cumming plays Donal, the younger of the pair, driven away by circumstance towards a new home in America and a glitzy jazz career; Cox himself co-stars as Sandy, who stayed behind in the homeland to look after their father and take the reins of the family’s famous whisky brand, Glen Nairn. After decades apart, it’s an earnest letter from Sandy that has Donal finally making the trip homeward across the pond, with his adult daughter and granddaughter in tow, too.
‘Be careful with time, Amy. It can creep up on you’
There’s a lot of baggage to be worked through as Donal returns to the town of Glenrothan, but everyone seems to be working flat out to try and convince him to stay this time. He’s bombarded with bagpipes within seconds of touching down at the airport, and before long he and his family are being whisked away by Shirley Henderson’s character, an old friend Jess, who seems to have prolonged the car ride by about two hours by taking the most scenic route through the Highlands possible.
Cox would have it said that the film is as heartfelt a letter to Scotland as the one Donal found in the post. We’re clearly meant to be won over by the beauty of the place in real time, falling back in love with it in a whole new way, mirroring a potential path of Donal’s own journey, but while the on-location photography is as bonnie as Donal himself admits (at one point, he seems to pull over and stop the car just to hop out and say as much) there’s an air of ‘YouTube travel vlog’ to the framing (and amount) of the film’s drone shots.
They just don’t feel like Cox had a hand in them; more like he sent the second unit to go out and grab something for the ‘tourism’ interludes. I remarked last week that one of California Schemin’s greatest assets was how strong a sense of place it had – the authenticity that McAvoy brought to his own Scottish story.
Really simple parts of Schemin’ had the audience in the room tittering at the way that McAvoy had put elements of the Scottish experience on-screen; there’s much less of that same authenticity at play here, despite Cox’s own Scottish blood. Instead, it feels more like a postcard brought to life than a trip to a real Scottish town, leading some to compare Glenrothan to some kind of Hallmark movie, now with extra whisky.
I first heard of this film in the run-up to last year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival when it became clear that Cox had decided not to give it its premiere here. The festival would have been too small a place to open his first feature film, despite a hefty sum of the budget coming straight from Screen Scotland, a government-funded program built on our very own Scottish taxes. If you’ve worked in Scotland, you probably contributed to some small part of the film in some way and yet instead of lending the festival a leg up in return, Cox took his Scottish offering to Toronto instead in the hopes of drumming up a little more prestige (despite 2024’s blockbuster Alien: Romulus having its UK premiere right in our very own Cameo Picturehouse). It’s hard to buy into the idea at the heart of this film – that Scotland’s the bee’s knees and the place to be – when the director himself has basically taken the inverse trajectory of Donal’s story. It just makes the message ring rather hollow.
That being said, Cox and Cumming’s performances are without a doubt the best part of the film. They’re both extremely capable actors (I last saw Alan Cumming as a maliciously colourful rubber-hose cartoon in last year’s series of Doctor Who) and you’re able to get a good sense of not only their dynamic as long-estranged brothers but an idea of each man’s perspective on the separation.
There’s no villain at play here – you can make an argument in favour of both men – and there are quaint comedic moments between them, too, usually revolving around being far, far too old for these squabbles. The pair make a habit of sitting down by the lake together and chewing the scenery, mulling over wounds from long ago, but these brief scenes are the closest thing Glenrothan offers to a treat – they’re understated and well-acted and I’d have liked to see a lot more of them.
The film builds itself around the pair’s relationship but it would have been all the better for ditching some of the exterior elements and delving even further into the meat and tatties of their bond.
Outside of those character moments, the script is, sadly, all kinds of clunky. While we’re told it’s been forty years since Donal left town, we’re left to infer that he’s had some kind of major bump on the head sometime in the interim period because he seems, for all the world, to be suffering from a severe case of amnesia. ‘This was your old room’ says Sandy as he leads him to his bed; when he reconnects with Jess, she feel the need to say ‘this was where we used to smoke’.
Give the man some credit – surely he knows these things already? Surely he can remember? I know why it’s stated outright – it’s exposition for the sake of the audience – but there are far better ways to work a similar point than stating all this in bold. It feels like a small qualm to take with the film, but once you start to notice the artifice of it, you feel the screenwriter’s hand all over the script rather than feeling as though you’re watching real people. Emotional confrontations between characters move far, far too quickly and the cast really have their work cut out for them to sell the speed at which their sympathies shift to and fro. You’d need a really mercurial director to wrangle this script into something salvageable but as a first-timer, Cox has seemingly failed to glean such performances out of his actors here, despite decades of his own experience as a performer.
As the film went on, the Hallmark elements and the glossy rural setting converged in such a way that I was surprisingly reminded of last month’s Mother’s Pride, which hit a lot of the same beats, right down to a prodigal son returning home and a local brew bringing a whole community together. I didn’t love Mother’s Pride – it felt incredibly by-the-book and was sickly sweet in a sort of queasy way – but there were times in Glenrothan where I did wonder whether I’d been too harsh on Pride.
For all that film’s faults, it did manage to string the plight of the family and the success of the beer together in a tangible and satisfying way; Glenrothan’s whisky storyline feels like an outright afterthought.
There are nice moments between Cumming and Cox and I had a grin on my face for a few brief scenes where Donal gets to have a bit of a sing-song with the true locals, but whereas I would’ve liked to visit the town of Mother’s Pride by the end of that film, I wasn’t sold on this place alongside Donal in the way that Cox clearly wants you to be. By the end of Glenrothan, I was more than ready to swap out the Scottish Highlands and head home all the way to…well, Edinburgh. Not exactly Chicago, but I’m sure you catch my meaning.
BBFC: Rated 12A for infrequent strong language, moderate violence.
Glenrothan is in cinemas now.
