Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold) **

Dir. Andrea Arnold

Starring Katie Jarvis, Michael Fassbender, Charlotte Collins, Harry Treadaway, Rebecca Griffiths

Sometimes it's better if a film completely fails on every level. There's less disappointment if you can just write it off completely and do a mental countdown until the movie ends. It can certainly be more frustrating if parts of a movie work really well so it grabs you early, but then you watch it just sit there and waste that early potential with several ridiculous flaws. Unfortunately, that is the case with Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank, which squanders a strong central performance from Katie Jarvis on a poorly paced story filled with stupid clichés and hollow supporting characters.

Mia (Jarvis) is not your typical teen girl, unless of course you've seen an independent movie before. She drinks constantly, gets into fights, and every other word she speaks is of the four letter variety. Part of the problem is her mother, who isn't the best role model, what with her late night sex parties and drinking binges. It's certainly a fractured mother-daughter relationship, which threatens to get even more fractured when Mia develops an unhealthy attraction to her mother's boyfriend Connor (Michael Fassbender).

The opening shots of Fish Tank offer up some promise, nicely detailing the gritty life that Mia leads, and Katie Jarvis has a confident and strong screen presence that promises better things to come. Unfortunately, things start to go downhill when we meet the other characters. Her mother is never developed much beyond slutty boozehound, and the depth and complexities required for a genuinely compelling exploration of her relationship with Mia are nonexistent. This is not a slight to Charlotte Collins, who does what she can in an underwritten role.

Even worse is the relationship between Mia and Connor, which is not convincingly developed. The whole relationship is a ridiculously contrived method to have the character grow up and learn an important lesson, sort of a darker variation on last year’s An Education. The filmmakers (and particularly Fassbender) never seem to know what to make of his character. It's convincing that Mia would be interested, but never once are we given a good reason why this guy would take the actions that he does in the 2nd half of the film. The more we learn about him, the less sense he makes.

Andrea Arnold won raves for her debut “Red Road”, which I have not seen. I don’t doubt her talent as her visual sense is quite strong, and if she freed herself from the confines of familiar material, we could’ve had something interesting here. Instead, we get a phony third act (the dance audition is ridiculously predictable) with no credible dramatic resolutions. Arnold fails at her last shot for dramatic resonance with her depiction of Mia and her mother dancing together, a scene that was much more memorable and moving when Laura Dern and Elizabeth Berridge did it in 1985's "Smooth Talk".