Steel Country, review: Andrew Scott was a Fleabag favourite, but his versatility has limits
Dir: Simon Fellows
Cast: Andrew Scott, Denise Gough, Bronagh Waugh, Jared Bankens, Catherine Dyer, J.D. Evermore
15 cert, 88 min
It’s no fluke of distribution that the Irish production Steel Country, a small-town murder mystery set in America’s depressed rust belt, has lingered for release until the moment when its star, Andrew Scott, reached a new and intense level of recognition.
As Fleabag’s Hot Priest – he’s known by no other name – Scott was sensationally interesting to watch. But his versatility does have limits.
Donny Devlin, a socially awkward garbage collector in a Pennsylvanian backwater, could have been a great Scott character if the writing and direction were more up to snuff.
This reclusive oddball – treated with arm’s-length sufferance by the rest of the community – is hiding away the kind of trauma Scott has signalled so skilfully in other performances. Sea Wall, say: the short play written for him by Simon Stephens in 2008.
You can see what he hoped to achieve with this role. But it winds up feeling like a misuse of him, for which blame falls fairly squarely on director Simon Fellows, for failing to channel Scott’s raw energy in a more convincing or detailed way.
Donny is scruffy and inarticulate, prone to twitching and sudden outbursts – things suddenly go quiet at a local bar, when he’s talking privately to a policeman, and barks his head off at the bartender for trying to take his order.
Sometimes, though, a character’s misjudgements need to be separated from those made in the editing room. You catch Scott pushing hard at eccentric effects that shouldn’t have made the cut.
For reasons we can’t immediately grasp, Donny is drawn to the case of a drowned teenager called Tyler, whose face, peering from a top floor window, he'd become used to seeing on his morning rounds with the garbage truck. This is badly established by him just staring up at the empty window in the first scene, before we have any idea what’s on his mind.
Everyone else writes off the death as simple misadventure – which is bizarre and implausible, given the shallow creek the body pitched up in. Only Donny senses foul play and sets about some very intrusive amateur sleuthing.
His meddling – even digging the body up for a belated, unauthorised autopsy – gets so insistent that it has the unintended effect of making him seem guilty of something, but it’s roundly ineffectual in either dispensing clues or moving the plot along.
Two of Scott’s compatriots play the women in his life: a solid Denise Gough is Donny’s contemptuous ex, who has custody of their daughter, but Gough plays her with such brassy confidence it’s hard to imagine her ever being an item with this snivelling wreck.
Bronagh Waugh, as his co-worker, is the most believably American of the three. Their scenes have a casual ease, but she has nothing to do with the main story, and almost too much screen time for such an incidental character.
It’s a bungled business, making obvious errors of staging: when Donny pins a suspect against a pick-up truck using his own car, there’s plenty of room and time for the guy to simply step out of harm’s way.
And when the script heaves its attention towards the weighty matter of child abuse, nothing really adds up because complicit minor players are so sketchily conceived.
It’s a particularly enervating kind of mystery in which no one but Donny, our Gumpian sleuth, is bothered to take an interest – so child abuse will do. No one involved in Steel Country, surely, meant for it to land as such a mundane solution.
