Father Earth (2022): big issues tackled in Graham Fellows’s small-scale fashion (Review)

There is a school of thought that, if you’re going to make a film with one obvious vulnerability, you should acknowledge it as soon as possible in order to disarm your critics. Anyone making a film about climate change in 2022 will know exactly what the naysayers will come out with, largely because they haven’t changed their song sheet since the days of the Whole Earth Catalog: you’ll be called smug, self-righteous, unrealistic, elitist, all the hits and more. Given this, it’s a nice touch for Graham Fellows to start his new film Father Earth by introducing himself as an “eco-warrior and character comedian” fantasising about building an ecologically sound studio that could attract “appreciative guests like Sting and Annie Lennox”. Couple this with the lyrics of the self-penned song that runs under the opening scenes – “Excuse me, would you help me save the world?/ The Earth is dying, I’m just a bit concerned” – and it serves welcome notice that Fellows’s comic voice is as cheerfully self-deprecating when he’s playing himself as it is when he’s playing John Shuttleworth.

A little digression on Fellows’s career might be necessary for the uninitiated. He first appeared in 1978 under the name Jilted John, with an irresistibly dumb, Martin Hannett-produced self-titled punk hit. None of Jilted John’s follow-up singles charted, and he was condemned to one-hit wonder status until he reappeared almost a decade later in the character of John Shuttleworth, a middle-aged aspiring singer-songwriter. Fellows fleshed out the Shuttleworth universe by playing other characters like John’s manager Ken Worthington, who dubbed himself “TV’s Mr. Clarinet Man” after a last-place appearance on a 1973 edition of New Faces. He’s had other characters, but Shuttleworth seems to be his claim to immortality. The character has appeared interacting with real people in two Fellows-directed films, 2006’s It’s Nice Up North and 2009’s Southern Softies.

It’s Nice Up North featured cinematography by another major chronicler of parochial Britain, Martin Parr. Parr said that one of his favourite things about making the film was realising the ‘wrong’ shots – shaky, blurry, otherwise not up to Parr – could be just as expressive and emotional as the technically perfect ones. It’s a mission Fellows continues in Father Earth, which resembles the “video diaries” that proliferated around the turn of the millennium more than it does the hyper-slick nature films that make up most of documentary cinema’s engagement with environmentalism. Again, Fellows is ahead of the likely criticism here. The home-movie look of Father Earth is well-suited to the film’s narrative, which is as much a chronicle of Fellows’s relationship with his ailing father Derek as it is about him realising his environmental dreams.

As someone who is currently caring for a dying relative, this strand of the film hit hard for me. The first inkling of what might be happening comes early on when Fellows talks enthusiastically about auditioning for a part in a film by Victoria Wood, who died in 2016. Over the course of the film we see Covid strike, children grow up, and plans and opportunities come and go. The original plan, clearly, was for this to be as brisk a follow-up to Southern Softies as that film was to It’s Nice Up North, but life changed the script. The television schedules are awash with shows where celebrities go on a capital-j Journey to some harrowing part of their life, and some of them are very emotional. But none of them feel as intimate as Father Earth, and the film’s unfashionably lo-fi look is part of its success here. Derek is introduced to us as a sprightly octogenarian holding forth about diopters. He resembles Michael Rosen, which is [clicks] noice. You like him as soon as you meet him, and part of that is because you’re seeing him act as he would in front of his son’s camcorder, rather than how he would in front of a full television crew.

For all the protracted development of Father Earth, it feels like a timely work for 2022. It’s not just that the grassroots environmental activism Fellows is engaging in is both increasingly popular and increasingly brutally suppressed by the British state. It’s also that I’m beginning to see the seeds of a backlash against the sheer, glossy perfection of the modern broadcast-quality image. It’s a subterranean backlash that’s currently surfaced only in the odd Sight & Sound retrospective of early digital cinema, but I suspect it will grow, if only because the alternative is so miserable. One of the most depressing experiences I’ve had on Twitter – and it’s Twitter, so the competition is fierce – came when a friend came back from a major international film festival and posted stills of every film he’d loved. I realised that every single one of them, whether it was a European auteur piece, a buzzy K-drama or an American Oscar hopeful, had the exact same “moody”, desaturated, shadowy blue-grey LUT applied to them. Streaming services and legacy channels’ horror of broadcasting a non-standardised image is creating a world where every country’s cinema looks exactly the same, the ending of Animal Farm in 1080p.

Fellows stands against this for reasons that are perfectly in keeping with his comic voice; he celebrates the flawed, the scaled-down, the handmade. Someone, surely, must have pitched him a movie where John Shuttleworth becomes a megastar, but he’d never make it. The detail of his comic characterisations is comparable to Steve Coogan, but unlike Coogan, whose meteoric rise was fuelled by universal recognition of his extraordinary talent, Fellows’s experience with Jilted John means he knows what it’s like to be written off early, and this empathy with the marginal and unsuccessful is, ironically, what’s made him a lasting success.

Father Earth was made available to rent on 1st December, but Fellows will be touring cinemas with a Q&A after the screening until December 15th. It’s an enticing opportunity to get a closer look into the offbeat, proudly unfashionable sensibility that produced the film, although I should note Fellows isn’t entirely a man out of time – Father Earth reveals that he, too, tried baking bread during lockdown.

Father Earth