Unforgivable
BBC iplayer
★★★★★

 

UNFORGIVABLE, acclaimed screenwriter Jimmy McGovern’s latest drama for the BBC, is an unflinching depiction of child sexual abuse and its aftershocks, set in a working-class Liverpool family.

Following on from McGovern’s focus on prison experience, Time, starring Sean Bean, and bringing a cast of actors familiar from previous McGovern hard-hitters such as the Accused series, the current work takes the viewer into the heart of a family crisis of betrayal.

Unforgivable has been compared to Stephen Graham’s four-part series Adolescence, also set in Liverpool and another stirring depiction of societal violence at family level. By contrast with the extended Adolescence, a marked feature of McGovern’s skill here is the economy of the writing, condensing an immense emotional arc into a single feature.

In probing the story for deeper nuances, Unforgivable plays its ironies to the hilt.

“I’ve had a few other women,” ponytailed granddad Brian (David Threlfall) tells his mate Paul Patterson (Mark Womack) at the funeral of his wife. “No-one’s perfect,” says Paul. “Your missus loved you, that’s all that counts.” Men trail their deceptions through the drama, blithely unconscious to their betrayals.

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Brian is father of Joe (Bobby Schofield), currently doing two years for sexual touching of Tom, his 12-year-old nephew. The film examines the crime with a searing honesty. Paedophile Joe is subtly downplayed by Schofield as an average “Joe” — neither a monster nor a fully fledged person. He has been cast out of society; taken from his isolation cell we see him marched through a wing of prisoners baying for his “nonce’s” blood. “Ey, there’s fuckin’ bacon on the wing.” “You’re gonna die here, you.”

Ironically, in a focus on men who split off from owning their worst attributes, it is the paedophile who arrives at deeper insight. “St. Maura’s takes in men who have sexually offended,” Joe’s probation officer (a brilliantly cast John May) tells him. “It’s either that or a tent.”

At St. Maura’s, former-nun, therapist Katherine (played by Anna Maxwell Martin) fearlessly leads Joe to a reckoning with the enormity of his depraved act against Tom. “So what made you think he’d like you to touch his penis?” She gets Joe to open up partly by revealing her own vulnerability: “To show you that this goes both ways.”

The focus on the victim Tom (Austin Haynes) is not lessened by engaging with his predator. Tom is shown struggling to recover his former, unsullied self. He has stopped talking, has become violent, is being excluded from school by a careerist headteacher only interested in attendance metrics. Anna Friel, solid as Tom’s frantically worried mum, Anna, battles familiar impossibilities facing the single mum — a father who “won’t pay a single penny, not a single penny,” towards supporting his kids, and a society that won’t support her either.

To get onto a 21-week waiting list for acute mental health treatment, Tom attempts suicide. “They don’t think it was a genuine attempt,” Anna tells his dad. “I’ve been trying to get him an appointment with the Mental Health Bureau. This means they’ll definitely see him now.”

Without turning drama into sermon, McGovern mirrors the splitting off of personal betrayals by characters, with the hostile environment of austerity Britain. Interesting in this light is a statistic released from last year’s Stockport riots: according to Police figures 41 per cent of men arrested during the riots had previously been reported for crimes associated with intimate partner violence.

In making the personal of this drama political, McGovern points towards some kind of “truth and reconciliation” process for the family, requiring the painful work of self-recognition we see Joe go through, and also his dad Brian. “I told Joe he broke his mother’s heart ... but I did too,” Brian says, on learning his dead wife had known about his infidelity.

The final irony emerges with Joe’s admission that he had been sexually abused as a 12-year-old by none other than Brian’s friend, Paul Patterson. “Some men who abuse have themselves been abused,” his therapist acknowledges. Joe goes to the police and Paul is charged with historical sexual abuse.

Seen much earlier in the funeral car telling stories to Tom and his brother, Paul’s benign-seeming presence at the heart of the family is chilling. He is played with skilful charm by Mark Womack as a presence that hovers in the background, but a man who is in fact a coldly manipulative abuser, under the cover of his pose as football coach and charismatic dad figure.

Although slightly at odds with the docudrama realism of the rest of Unforgivable, Paul Patterson’s final speech from the dock plays the scapegoating card against the complainant Joe: “So I ask you,” he addresses the jury, “who do you believe? Me, a father and a grandfather. Or him, a child abuser?” One guess who the jury goes with.

Unforgivable is available for free on BBC iplayer