Green Street (dir. Levi Alexander, 2005) — Review

“Millwall and West Ham firms hate each other,” explains Pete (Charlie Hunnam), the disgustingly stylish anti-hero of Green Street. “Like the Yankees and the Red Sox?” pipes elfin colonial import Matt (Elijah Wood), for the benefit of the film’s target audience. “More like the Israelis and the Palestinians,” clarifies his guide, with the cultural nuance and baffling accent of Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins. And away we go into the ridiculous world of Green Street, a transatlantic hybrid of Oliver Twist and Skins with a pleasingly himbo-ish take on toxic masculinity.

The 2005 crime drama really does feel like a snapshot of the US-UK ‘Special Relationship’: a heartwarming tale of an Ivy League nepotism baby who runs away to join a violent football gang in East London, starring Frodo Baggins and a Geordie lad who was discovered while drunk in a JD Sports. Green Street has everything — sports! drugs! annoying wife! ‘English pub!’ — and blessedly refrains from even gesturing towards a cerebral take on it. Which is really the only good thing to do with a portrayal of Bri’ish sporting culture.

With the nation frothing over its “Lionesses” taking home the Euros last month, now seems a topical moment to look back at the culture which arguably kept them from getting either the funding or the public interest up to now. Green Street is a paean to the role of chugging pints, bellowing, and breaking things — under the structural umbrella of a football match — in blokey culture. The constant resort to mindless violence in lieu of a more cerebral take on its themes of class and wealth are, at least, unpretentiously convincing, thanks to its gloriously punchable characters.

Elijah Wood stars as Matt, a Harvard journalism major, with a famous journalist dad, who’s kicked out after his obnoxious finance bro roomie sticks him with some Bolivian marching power. Like a Lifetime movie version of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, this exposition successfully riles the British viewer into a foam of bafflement and indignation, which is immediately sated with a time-honoured treat: said American coming to London and getting picked on.

The backbone of this implausible yarn, though, is the unlikely relationship that forms after Matt arrives at the plush London pad of his sister Shannon and her husband Steve — only to have Steve’s soccer-yob brother Pete crash the party. Hunnam steals the show as the Ur-Lad, a swaggering Stone Island Ken Doll who might look like a hip millennial graphic designer on the outside, but bubbles with the casual racism, homophobia, and other charms of the stereotypical Ultra. In a wise departure from Hollywood storytelling, though, his human side emerges not through a heart-to-heart, but with some beers, light violence, and casual slurs, which allow him to bond with Matt and reveal his day job: as a primary school teacher. Nice touch.

Intoxicated by the violence and camaraderie which lay the path for unconditional acceptance — despite his comically nerdy, Crimson-editing physical presence — Matt throws himself into the West Ham ‘firm’ known as the Green Street Elite. Despite the awful slang and worse Cockney accents, the film achieves the difficult task of conveying the darker side of London raucousness to an America audience: “The splitting up of a family, the death of a brother and son and the deep, dark depression”, noted Leo Gregory, who played alcoholic, volatile Bovver, whose ridiculous name somehow fails to overshadow the darkness of his character arc. “To me that doesn’t glamourise it.”