It’s not every day that a former drug smuggler takes to the stage in front of an Edinburgh International Film Festival audience but convention has never stopped Howard Marks. Marks joined actors Rhys Ifans and David Thewlis at the European première of Mr Nice, a biopic detailing the Welshman’s heady days transporting outrageous quantities of cannabis around the world during the sixties, seventies and eighties.
In spite of his criminal activities, there’s something imminently likeable about Howard Marks. He’s humble and self-deprecating, and unexpectedly blunt about the unpleasant realities of a life spent skirting the edges of the underworld. And while Mr Nice revels in the mythos Marks has built up around himself, it’s also a surprisingly human film, depicting both the highs and lows of an extraordinary life on the fringes of society.
- Rhys Ifans in Mr Nice
Rhys Ifans pours his heart into the role of Howard Marks, from early years spent in Welsh coal-mining town to an unlikely scholarship at Oxford and his indoctrination into a world of drugs and debauchery. After a brief sojourn as a teacher, Marks soon abandons any pretence of cleaning up his act when circumstance leads to him trafficking a carload of cannabis from Germany to Britain in the early 1970s.
He soon encounters Jim McCann, a rogue member of the IRA, who helps Marks smuggle high grade hashish into the UK. McCann, played by David Thewlis, is intense and upredictable, a darkly comic contrast to the effortlessly cool Marks. Within a matter of months, the two men are the masterminds behind one of the world’s most prolific drug rings and begin to attract unwanted attention.
While Ifans as Marks and Thewlis as McCann are indisputably the star attractions, director Bernard Rose leaves his own stylistic fingerprints on the film. Rose uses film aspect and texture as shorthand for particular periods or decades and to mark the passage of time. The mid-1960s are denoted by black and white footage, shot in 4:3 aspect ratio, while the 1970s are characterised by strong, saturated colours and orange-tinged celluloid. It’s a refreshing alternative to the scores of title cards that would otherwise clutter the screen.
Howard Marks
It’s unfortunate that Rose doesn’t apply the same care and attention to the morality of Howard Mark’s involvement in the drugs trade. Though the Welshman claims never to have dealt in hard drugs or to have resorted to violence, it’s difficult not to believe that the audience is witnessing a sanitised and distorted version of reality.
While there are certainly human and personal costs to be paid when Marks runs afoul of the law, we see little of the real violence, poverty or exploitation that underscores the global cannabis trade. That Howard Marks himself views Mr Nice as a strong campaigning tool in the fight for the legalisation of marajuana is surely telling in itself and does little to detract from the sense that Rose is happy to perpetuate and enhance the Marks legend rather than tackle the questions his story raises.
Self-indulgent moral ambiguity aside however, at its best Mr Nice is thoroughly engrossing, a gripping drama liberally laced with visual and situational humour. Mr Nice won’t go on general release in British cinemas until October but there’s a strong chance it could emerge as a cult classic in years to come, alongside Withnail and I, Trainspotting, Human Traffic and other commentaries on drug culture in these islands.
Watch the trailer for Mr Nice on Youtube.
Images courtesy of EIFF.