Mini-Review: Family (2001)

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Dir. Takashi Miike

Japan

I am a huge fan of Miike, but I realise that from a self proclaimed director-for-hire the massive output and the variety of formats he works in could lead to an erratic filmography. Sat between truly great films like Audition (1999) and Ichi The Killer (2001) is this work, bizarrely split onto two discs as two eighty or so minute films. A manga adaptation about warring yakuza, backstabbing and a budget large enough to afford a tank and a water-ski shootout, Family has the traces of all that makes Miike interesting. Brothers from a family broken into pieces by yakuza in different areas of the crime underground, a viewpoint from minorities in Japan, and a female character who is a Christian. Unfortunately it is an exceptionally dull story. Nothing in the film is inherently original or of interest, worsened by the technical quality. It is filmed on a cheap digital camera, which looks awful; Miike can use digital to his advantage, such as the probing of the image and voyeurism in Visitor Q (2001), but here it makes everything sparse and lacking. Miike also sadly continues the trend of using generic heavy metal music, at pointless loud volumes, over sequences that comes off as noise, surprising when he is very adept in his sound and music track choices.

It is a slug to get through both parts. It also makes the more gruelling sequences, such as a prolonged rape scene starting with molestation with feet, dubious. I will defend Miike over stuff like this, especially since he always, even in lurid genre works, makes such sequences discomforting and prevents the viewer from being able to shrug them off as merely sequences, but Miike needs to have made a good film around such sequences to prevent them from being merely tasteless, the result of which adds depth to them or sticks a metaphorical knife in the viewer’s brain to startle them. Since this is a poor film, barring some experiments with sound and image, such sequences just come off as pointlessly offensive, not helped by the fact that, while Miike is known for improvising or changing his scripts and stories during filmmaking, he is dependent on scripts being good or having something of interest for him to run with like many other directors. Family as a whole has no sense of Miike being fully engaged with it. It was made between some of his best work, showing this is a minor blip in his filmmaking, but unfortunately it is one of those true mistakes in a director’s filmography that discolours it. It is not an interesting failure one can learn to appreciate or actually love, by itself or in context of an auteur, but something so rudimentary you don’t want to own it even if it means a gap in the filmmography of one of your favourite directors.