Liverpool-born TV luminary Jimmy McGovern first rose to prominence – after a stint on soaps like Brookside and Corrie – with Cracker, a detective series starring Robbie Coltrane as a misanthropic criminal psychologist. Since then, he has become the great chronicler of Britain’s ills. From the Hillsborough disaster to the Iraq war, via inquisitions on joint enterprise, unemployment, and disability cuts, he has run the gamut of social failings. And a recurring theme, running from 1994’s Priest to 2017’s Broken, is the legacy of child abuse, a subject he explores in profound detail, again, in BBC Two’s Unforgivable.
Joe Mitchell (Bobby Schofield) is in prison, having been found guilty of sexually assaulting his 12-year-old nephew, Tom (Austin Haynes). Tom’s mother, Anna (Anna Friel), struggles with Tom’s increasingly erratic behaviour, while grieving for her and Joe’s mother, who has just died. When Joe is released from prison, he is offered a second chance by a group of Christians, led by Katherine (Anna Maxwell Martin), who believe in rehabilitation and offer Joe a chance to, if not start again, resume some sort of quotidian existence. “Isn’t forgiveness selfish?” she asks Joe, as they explore how he can rejoin society. But Joe isn’t really looking for absolution; he’s looking for answers. And here, the long, multi-generational shadow of abuse casts its shade.
“No one’s perfect,” family friend Paul (Mark Womack) consoles Anna’s widower father Brian (David Threlfall), who, in addition to losing his wife, is estranged from his paedophile son and watching his daughter’s family life disintegrate. In a way, he’s right. All of McGovern’s characters are dealing with the fractured messiness of life (even Maxwell Martin’s God-botherer has breast cancer, “the nun’s disease”). This panoply of personal disasters gives rise to some brilliant acting from the assembled ensemble of McGovern regulars. Schofield is transformed from his roles in This City Is Ours and SAS: Rogue Heroes, imbuing Joe with a magnetic, itching discomfort. Friel, meanwhile, steals every scene she’s in as a desperate, but still poised, mother. The material is red meat to fine actors, and they eat it up.
Whether it’s so nourishing to audiences is debatable. There is no challenging McGovern’s willingness to gaze into the abyss – he has been doing it for more than 30 years now – but is the abyss gazing back? As it progresses, Unforgivable tries to engage with the cyclical nature of abuse (“Some men who abuse have themselves been abused,” Katherine informs Joe) but ends up feeling simplified and rushed. A complex, nuanced narrative that might’ve stretched over the course of a multi-episode mini-series is, here, condensed into 105 minutes. Joe’s dual role – as both victim and abuser – is one that oscillates, the very instability of its nature forming the crux of how these crimes are perpetrated and then covered up. But the constraints of the plot dumb this down somewhat, and the narrative becomes increasingly procedural. “I could cope with the lying,” Joe laments, as he picks at old wounds. “But all this truth? It’s too much for me.”
McGovern has worked with non-fiction in the past (Sunday, for example, is about Bloody Sunday), but more often he builds, like Ken Loach, stories as composites of abstracted case studies. At its best, this approach adds an intimacy that true life portraits can struggle with, where the interiority is limited by the strictures of fact. But, at other times, it can feel like these characters are only being imagined into life in order to put them through intense suffering. Unforgivable is undoubtedly a sympathetic piece – even Joe is afforded a reluctant dignity – but it is also a concatenation of personal miseries. Sunlight, it seems, doesn’t often fall on Merseyside.
For some, it will be enough simply to give these tough issues an airing. “Important” is an easy adjective to apply to a McGovern drama. But for viewers to endure a couple of hours of fairly unrelenting gloom, there needs to be a spark beyond great performances and plausible writing. Unforgivable feels like an endurance test, whose message – that empathy must prevail – could’ve been expressed with more dynamic light and shade.
