Child’s-eye view

With a face as pure and gleaming as a mother of pearl button, 7-year-old Liam (Anthony Burrows) is our guide through the confusing, troubling shifts of adult agendas in Stephen Frears’ heartbreaking, unforgettable Liam.

Set in pre-WWII Liverpool, Liam opens on a jubilant note as a mother (Claire Hackett) and father (Ian Hart) celebrate New Year’s Eve while their three children giggle at this keyhole glimpse into adult lunacy and a rare moment of unbridled joy.

But the already financially struggling family is soon dealt a harsh blow. Dad is laid off from his shipyard job, and the money earned by daughter Teresa (Megan Burns), a maid for a wealthy Jewish family, and eldest son Con (David Hart) barely cover their expenses. As their economic troubles wear on, the family observes their father’s growing anger as he blames the Jews and the Irish for their poverty.

Ian Hart’s moving performance gives a human dimension to the kind of blind rage other films might write off as pure evil. Frears’ thoughtful film shows why fascism might have appealed to the luckless, the unemployed and the bitter men and women whose suffering was exploited by political interests.

But it’s most often the family’s youngest, Liam, who conveys the vulnerability of poverty and an unjust adult world. Adult behavior — seen through Liam’s eyes — ranges from misguided and thoughtless to blatantly cruel. The Catholic Church dishes out heaping helpings of the latter in a public school curriculum seemingly dedicated to nothing but fire and brimstone.

As the day of their first communion approaches, Liam and his terrified classmates are given daily, nightmarish instruction from a prune-faced teacher, whose every condemning word falls like a toad from her lips, and a beady-eyed priest. Frears conveys the sadistic mindset of a religion founded on fear and guilt that leaves the children in Liam’s household convinced of their own steady march to hell. The children absorb the church’s message wholly, taking to heart its guilt-centered teachings, convinced that a mere glimpse of a mother’s naked body or a grown-up’s adulterous affair is confirmation of their own inherent evil.

There are lighthearted elements to Liam’s story as well, like a sudden consuming curiosity regarding sex inspired by the great nudes of art history. With the orderly efficiency of a wee scientist, Liam aims to settle a score with biology, with one hand on his sister’s nightgown and the other grasping an oil painting nude for comparison’s sake.

It’s hard not to see some element of comparable sadism in Frears for managing to wrest from Burrows a performance of such astounding shading. With his shining, alert eyes and serious, down turned mouth, Burrows’ face seems torn between the glowing, rapt expectations of a child’s view and an encroaching seriousness and solemnity inspired by too early a familiarity with life’s troubles.

Few things equal the trauma of watching a child’s face register the pain and confusion of wounding adult behavior, and Burrows delivers that look again and again in Liam.

The utter respect and solemnity with which children receive adult instruction is conveyed in the minutest gestures, like Liam gingerly retrieving the school recess bell from between Christ’s crucified feet and executing his job as bell-ringer with the same gravity and sense of order with which a judge wields a gavel. When accused or chastised that same sense of seriousness threatens to overwhelm and smother Liam in shame and self-reproach. Choking back his first communion wafer through a throat clogged with tears or beaming at a rare show of affection between his perpetually bickering mother and father, Burrows conveys the heartbreaking shifts from agony to small moments of joy that register so immediately on a child’s face.

In a cinema of multimillion-dollar effects, it is this most refined and subtle of effects — the rapturous and humiliated expressions on a child’s face — that seem the greatest cinematic magic. Liam’s Dickensian travails are intensified by a face-twisting stutter that conveys the psychological paroxysm of a child unable to perform the ridiculous demands made by adults, and paralyzed by fear at how these changeable, violent beasts will react next.

In Liam, the adults are the weaklings who project their troubles onto others. Children are the strong, moral, resilient ones trying to measure up to a world that takes little account of their efforts.??