Fish Tank - An Education Without An Education

Here's one of those low budget gems that contains a performance so grounded and real, it's hard to believe the young actress at its center has never been in anything before. Fish Tank doesn't have a plot so much as it has a character. That character is Mia, played by Katie Jarvis. She's a 15 year old poverty row delinquent growing up in a housing project somewhere in Britain. Her mother is an unemployed party girl who could care less what Mia and her younger sister, Tyler, get into as long as it doesn't interrupt her fun.

Mia is at war with everything around her. She has a foul mouth and a fouler attitude. Five minutes into the film, she's already cursed out a bunch of sluts having a dance-off on the project's playground, head butted one of them, had the police called on her, and broken into a vacant apartment where she can have a drink and be by herself. She doesn't have a pleasant thing to say to anyone. Most of the time, she doesn't have anything to say at all. She is tall, awkward, and very pretty. She has an idea that she wants to be a dancer, and uses the vacant apartment as a dance studio to practice moves she sees in music videos. But with no one around to point her in the right direction, she is aimless and angry, and headed for trouble.

Then along comes Connor (played by Michael Fassbender), her mother's sexy new boyfriend, and there is instant chemistry between them, even though Connor is pushing 40. At first, Mia curses him out just like all the others. She believes that no one understands her, and her defense mechanism is to spew abusive language, then run. Connor breaks through her defenses by acting as a father figure, encouraging her rather than telling her to fuck off. He lends her a camera so that she can film her dance routine for an upcoming audition. He takes her and her sister and mother on a drive far out into the country, away from the prison-like confines of the projects, so they can see how beautiful it is if you just get away from the city.

They stop at a lake in the countryside, and a curious thing happens there. Mia and Connor wade into the river, and Connor catches a fish with his hands, and on the way back to shore, Mia cuts her ankle on a rock. Connor bandages it up for her, and gives her a piggy back ride back to the car, and it is while she is this close to him, right there at his neck, that she begins to be attracted to him.

What is great about the film is that you learn all this without being told. There is nothing forced about the progression of the characters. Nothing in the dialogue spells it out for you. We follow Mia through her ordeals, and we feel sympathy for her plight, and for a long time, the relationship between Mia and Connor is balanced on the razor's edge between appropriate and inappropriate, and could have gone either way. He could have been a father figure, or he could have slipped and taken advantage of this naive girl who is unaware of how inappropriate such a relationship is.

The power of the film, and the power of the performances by Jarvis and Fassbender, is in how this relationship is handled. You know it is going to go south, and when it does, you side with Jarvis, and you keep siding with Jarvis even after a third act of astounding sociopathic behavior, because Jarvis's performance is that good. It is as if we are watching a real girl in a real world, and we want her to get out even more than she does, and even after the horrible things that happen to her, and the horrible things that she does, we still empathize with her, because at that point in the movie, she's not a character anymore, she's someone that you know.