After watching Blue Valentine about 5 or 6 times within my first month of owning it and then re-watching Brokeback Mountain a couple of months ago (the first time I saw it was in the movie theater), I’ve been itching to go on a Michelle Williams streak. I had no idea her filmography was already so long, and while I’m not going to watch some of the films very early on in her career (such as Halloween H20 or But I’m a Cheerleader), I’m anxious to see the movies she’s starred in since her Dawson’s Creek days. One of those movies was Sharon Maguire’s (in just her second directorial effort, following the highly popular Bridget Jones’s Diary) Incendiary.

In Incendiary, Williams stars as a grieving mother/ wife who witnesses the terrorist bombing of the English Premier League’s Arsenal Football Club on live television. While the stadium is close enough that she can physically feel its effects, what instantly devastates her is that her son and husband are at the football match. What’s worse is that she is witnessing this tragedy while having an affair with a newspaper reporter named Jasper (Ewan McGregor – The Island, The Ghost Writer). Jasper would have been at the same football match had he not met our leading actor and skipped the game to return to her flat.

The first half of this movie is flawless. The setup of the story is told perfectly. The acting is superb. Within 30 minutes, it feels like we understand the family (wife/husband/son) and their relationship with each other. Most of that has to do with Williams, who seems to absorb each character she has ever played, so we forget, at times, that it is even her in this movie. She hasn’t picked the most joyous roles in her time, but that’s not what interests her. She seems to want to be an earnest actor, and she’s delivering.

The love between Williams (nameless in this movie and will be referred to as Young Mother) and her 3-year-old son is boundless. Maguire shows us in the very first scene just how secure their relationship is when they play the “who will blink first game,” a nightly ritual they have before bed. While her son’s eyes flicker as they shift, Williams has the more deliberate and noticeable closing of the eyes. This leads to a joyous “I win” from her son, and the two have a good laugh and a hug before she tucks him in. Maguire doesn’t stop there, though. Though it is clear that the young boy is the absolute joy of her life, Maguire shows us again through a scene with the two on the beach, holding hands, running back and forth to each other, holding hands, and always smiling. Maguire layers it on, and it becomes evident early that tragedy is about to strike. Also, with a title like Incendiary, it is no secret that something terrible is about to happen.

The relationship between Williams and her husband, Lenny, is tense at best. He works as a bomb squad defuser. He and she both know each day at work could be his last. When she asks him how his day at work was, his response is mundane. “I’m still here.” He’s a miserable man. He has not necessarily fallen out of love with his wife. Instead, he hates his job. He becomes so worried that he will die from it that it makes him physically nauseous. As a result, his life lacks passion. By this, I mean that it lacks passion outside of two things. Those two things are the love for his son and his love for Arsenal football. Because of Lenny’s misery and inability to let her help him, the Young Mother is left in a loveless marriage and finds comfort in the arms of another man (Jasper).

Jasper wants to be there for the Young Mother and feels a responsibility to be there. This is because of what they were doing when they witnessed the bombing. He does his best to respect her wish to be alone, but watching her crumble is too much for him to bear. He uses his contacts as a reporter to research and identify one of the stadium bombers. Upon receiving this information, the Young Mother proceeds to locate the man’s family. Her intentions are unknown, but we can assume that revenge is on her mind. There are a couple of twists and turns, which I will leave be.

What works well in this movie is Williams’ reaction to the events. Despite being in a loveless marriage, Williams is full of smiles when she is around her son and full of mischief and intrigue when she is being hit on and picked up in a pup by Jasper. But immediately after the incident, she is rushed to the stadium and frantically starts searching through the rubble, desperately hoping and praying that she will find her son alive. She is injured and taken to the hospital. The physical wounds on her face and body are bad but will heal. The emotional scars will remain forever.

The Young Mother loses all love for life. She falls into a severe depression, sometimes oblivious to the world around her. She seeks to punish those most responsible for the incident while falling into an imaginary world where her son is still alive. I am not the biggest fan of McGregor, but this is my favorite performance of his. He goes from being a barfly who makes it a habit of picking up lonely women to a man who seems affected by the events as much as the Young Mother, who lost her entire family. He almost abandons the life he lived beforehand, but because of the tragedy and where he was when the bombings occurred, his turn is believable.

Though this movie was too ambitious for its own good, I was still a fan. I’m not much of a fan of a film that tries to do more than it can and has a few too many coincidences to be believable. Still, I was engrossed in the relationships and moved by the performances. It didn’t make up for the movie’s flaws, and the film was still far from believable, but it did make it both likable and watchable. And while it got panned by most critics, I would still recommend it to fans of movies that feature heavy drama, broken relationships, or moving performances.

Plot 7/10
Character Development 10/10
Character Chemistry 10/10
Acting 10/10
Screenplay 7/10
Directing  7/10
Cinematography 10/10
Sound 9/10
Hook and Reel 10/10
Universal Relevance 6/10 (simplify this some, and it would be easier for us to relate)
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