‘Glenrothan’ Review: A Likable Cast Can’t Elevate Brian Cox’s Bottom-of-the-Barrel Scottish Family Dramedy [D] TIFF
Estranged brothers Sandy (Brian Cox) and Donal (Alan Cumming) have neither seen nor spoken to each other in over three decades. After their mother passed away, the brothers fought and Donal left the family home and whiskey distillery for America. After a fire destroys his Chicago blues club and a leer from Sandy saying he might be dying, Donal’s daughter (Alexandra Shipp) drags him with her and her daughter on their annual Summer trip to visit their uncle. Going back home means reuniting with both Sandy and Jess (Shirley Henderson), Donal’s former best friend who now serves as the master distiller at the family distillery, Glen Nairn. Donal isn’t sure if he wants to reconcile, or if he even knows what he wants from this trip, but Sandy does: He wants his younger brother to take up his birthright and run the distillery. The proposition dredges up old grudges and hurt feelings, and before long the rift between them widens. Will anyone be able to knock some sense into these silly Scottish men?
Brian Cox’s feature directorial debut Glenrothan desperately wants to be a musical. Music plays a heavy role, as you’d expect from a film that co-stars Tony winner Cumming as a Chicago blues club proprietor, but the blues standards and Scottish folk songs that comprise the soundtrack aren’t utilized the way they would be in a musical. Instead of advancing the plot or deepening the characters, the songs just sit there, with little reason for inclusion other than cultivating atmosphere. But the film’s screenplay, created by David Ashton and co-written with Jeff Murphy, would certainly benefit from some moments where we pause and go deeper into the characters. There’s not a single character here who isn’t a walking cliché, whether it’s the gruff Sandy, black sheep Donal, or bad-ass bitch with a heart of gold Jess. Any moment where the characters feel like they’re about to expose some deeper truth, the film opts for silence, putting it all on the actors to convey their internal monologues with facial expressions and body language. While it’s understandable that an actor like Cox would want to do something like this, especially with a cast this talented and likable, the net effect is that the characters feel extremely thin and surface-level. These moments of weighted silence cry out for musical introspection, especially given the overly broad tone of the film. If the characters broke into songs that spoke to their mental state, this would at least give them some depth and make the film’s focus on music feel like a vital part of the whole, instead of just another piece of local color.
Local color, however, seems to be the film’s driving force. Glenrothan is as much a love letter to Scotland as it is a story of family reconnection. Cinematographer Jaime Ackroyd shoots the misty beauty of the country so that it looks postcard-perfect, but its prettiness is as bland as Scottish cooking. Scotland, beautiful country though it may be, possesses neither the verdant hues of Ireland nor the windswept moodiness of the English moors. As presented here, it’s more gray and nondescript, clashing with the jaunty score in a way that doesn’t feel purposeful. It does feel like a good representation of the film overall, though, as there’s a level of seriousness to Cox’s overall approach that doesn’t fully match the corny screenplay. The fiddles and folk songs that comprise the film’s overly insistent score pile on cliché after cliché, making the film feel more like a parody of Scottish pride than a good example of it. It’s speaking to the lowest common denominator, as many cultural comedies do. But this screenplay is neither as wackily eccentric as something like My Big Fat Greek Wedding nor as grounded and prickly as something like The Banshees of Inisherin. No, instead of riotous laughter, Glenrothan goes for gentle nods of recognition; instead of profundity, it goes for cheap greeting-card-level sentiment. The film wants to be a big ol’ mainstream crowdpleaser, but it has hedged its bets so significantly that it’s only left with the most surface-level, dollar-store version of that. It’s “crowdpleasing,” and not even in the Susan Sontag camp way. Instead of being fun to watch, it’s so exhausting and overbearing that you’ll probably want to be three sheets to the wind when you watch it.
Bless their hearts, the performers try their best. Unfortunately, there’s just no saving this screenplay. Cumming is giving the best performance of the bunch, in large part because Donal is the best-written role. He manages to take this broad-as-a-barrel script and find actual subtlety, largely avoiding the mugging that Cox indulges in. Cox is operating on autopilot, doing his grizzled-but-lovable papa bear thing and dialing up the sentimentality just enough to engender sympathy. He and Cumming have decent brotherly chemistry that explodes at one point into the only genuinely funny moment in the whole film, but the screenplay’s structure is such that we don’t fully understand their conflict with each other until quite late, long past the point that we’ve stopped caring about it at all. Poor Alexandra Shipp is stranded with the blandest character, a walking exposition device that not even someone with her charisma and sunny demeanor can make interesting. Henderson is the beneficiary of the screenplay’s most successfully crowdpleasing lines, and the film could have used more of her feisty, no-nonsense demeanor. Jess is still a giant cliché of a character, the lone woman in a man’s world, but at least Henderson gives her an actual personality instead of the insipid approximations of such found everywhere else.
Scotland certainly hasn’t gotten its cinematic due over the years. When your most noticeable onscreen role is in Braveheart, it’s understandable that Scots would want to make something more appealing to share the love of their heritage with the world. Sadly, Glenrothan doesn’t have the depth necessary to translate as an enjoyable exploration of Scottish sensibility. This isn’t a subtle screenplay, but Cox approaches it as such, flattening the already flat dialogue and drowning the attempts at humor in whiskey-scented flop sweat. Due to this subtle approach, the film can’t even be enjoyed as something that’s so bad it’s good, as nothing in it even rises to the level of fun. The only thing that even hints at any true self-awareness as to the film’s quality is the use of the standard “One Meat Ball” as the film’s main musical theme, a genuinely bizarre choice that connects so little to the film’s story that it feels more like a nod to Cox’s personal taste than anything else. Fill the film with choices like that, and it becomes a tasty treat, something with actual personality and vision. Instead it’s derivative of other films that weren’t very good to begin with. Cox’s overly sober approach to the material indicates that he thinks he’s made something worth savoring, but if Glenrothan is a whiskey, then it’s barely aged for a month, let alone multiple years. More like Glenrotten.
Grade: D
This review is from the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival where Glenrothan had its world premiere. There is no U.S. distribution at this time.
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