The Arbor (2011)
Average Rating: 8.1/10
Reviews Counted: 43
Fresh: 41 | Rotten: 2
Smart and inventive, The Arbor offers some intensely memorable twists on tired documentary tropes.
Average Rating: 7.5/10
Critic Reviews: 9
Fresh: 8 | Rotten: 1
Smart and inventive, The Arbor offers some intensely memorable twists on tired documentary tropes.
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Average Rating: 3.7/5
User Ratings: 1,072
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Movie Info
Instead if making a conventional documentary or adapting Dunbar's play The Arbor for the screen, director Clio Barnard has crafted a truly unique work that transcends genre and defies categorization. Following two years conducting audio interviews with Dunbar's family, friends and neighbors, Barnard filmed actors lip-synching the interviews, flawlessly interpreting every breath, tick and nuance. The film focuses in particular on the playwright's troubled relationship with her daughter Lorraine
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Cast
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Neil Dudgeon
Steve -
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Christine Bottomley
Lisa -
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Manjinder Virk
Lorraine -
Robert Emms
David Dunbar -
Natalie Gavin
Andrea Dunbar
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All Critics (43) | Top Critics (9) | Fresh (42) | Rotten (2) | DVD (1)
Numerous celluloid experiments have fudged reality and fiction lately, but few are as formally inventive or socially revelatory as The Arbor.
Top CriticFor the morbidly curious, it's mesmerizing. But it's also a singularly watchable story for the strange, and strangely fitting, way in which it's told.
[An] exquisitely crafted docudrama.
Barnard's boldest move is to unveil the irresponsible chaos of the playwright's private life, and to make us wonder if the art was worth the suffering, after all.
Tough, worthy stuff.
Like a Ken Loach drama stripped to bare bones, "The Arbor" springs to life in the bright bitterness of Dunbar's prose, showcased in alfresco performances of contentious scenes from the play.
This is a fiercely intellectual piece of cinema that still manages to grab your heart and punch you in the gut.
...riveting stuff, all the more so since it's "real."
Documentaries often toy with the conventions of non-fiction storytelling to the detriment of their content, but Clio Barnard's innovative The Arbor provides a welcome exception to the norm.
British Poor Adrift in Turbulent 'Arbor'
The only weakness in this captivating film: too much screen time given to the trials and travails of Dunbar's half-Pakistani daughter, Lorraine, a heroin addict still suffering from the disinterest of her late mum.
The format suggests such films as "Synechdoche, New York" or "American Splendor," but Barnard has gone beyond them, also instilling a theatrical element befitting her subject.
It's an even handed and responsible profile that recognises the playwright's important contribution to British theatre without turning away from the vulnerable and flawed human being that she was.
The film's strange way of meandering off its original topic is never resolved, but even with its deficiencies The Arbor is always intelligent cinema.
The peanut gallery might say Clio Barnard's genre-bending The Arbor is a mixed-up moving target, but it's strikingly honed in on its subject: the lauded writer and loathed matriarch Andrea Dunbar.
Intense, startlingly creative. . .bio-doc. . .and searing portrait of destructive inheritance of addiction and domestic violence within . . .one family. . .and neighborhood.
From the sublimely ridiculous to the simply sublime, The Arbor exists at the intersection of life and art, reality and performance, documentary and fiction, and it explores that terrain in a way no other movie quite has before.
An epic piece of theatrical detachment
Original mixture of techniques makes this documentary provocative yet moving.
Brings the Dunbar story to life through a technique known as "verbatim theater," in which actors lip-synch testimony from the real people they're portraying.
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