Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		3.0
Overall		4.0

Sid & Nancy Blu-ray Movie Review

The Filth, the Fury, the Madness, the Love

Reviewed by Michael Reuben October 11, 2011

A sturdy cliche holds that a screen performer is either an actor or a movie star, that he (or she) either disappears into a character or infuses the character with a star persona the audience already knows. Tom Cruise is a movie star; Philip Seymour Hoffman is an actor. Occasionally, a truly exceptional talent -- say, Meryl Streep or Jack Nicholson in his prime -- manages to be both.

It's hard to remember now, but when Sid and Nancy was released in 1986, Gary Oldman could get away with being an actor. No one knew him then, especially in America, and he could disappear into the role of Sid Vicious, the legendary bass player of the even more legendary punk rock band, the Sex Pistols, who had died in 1979 of a heroin overdose at age 21. Oldman may not be exactly a movie star today, but he's immediately recognizable, because he's spent twenty-five years putting his stamp on one vivid character after another: Lt. (later Commissioner) Gordon in the Batman films, Sirius Black in Harry Potter, Mason Verger in Hannibal, Senator Runyon in The Contender, Dr. Smith in Lost in Space, the Russian terrorist Ivan Korshunov in Air Force One, Lee Harvey Oswald in JFK, a pair of eccentric villians for Luc Besson (Zorg in The Fifth Element and Stansfield in Leon, The Professional), the Irish gangster Jackie Flannery in State of Grace, the would-be black pimp Drexl in True Romance and, perhaps his most theatrical role of all, Dracula in Francis Coppola's reimagining of the Bram Stoker novel.

It's almost impossible now to watch Oldman's Sid Vicious without some awareness of this resume, because all these characters have something in common: They're all extreme in some way, even if whatever's extreme about them is kept tightly coiled up inside. You don't cast Gary Oldman to play someone ordinary. You cast him when you want an actor who can reach places (or at least suggest them) where normal people don't go. That's why director Alex Cox cast him as Sid Vicious, a personality who was more an idea than a performer, who most people had heard of but never seen, and who had to be portrayed in the face of expectations that would intimidate most actors into a fetal position. But not Oldman. He'd grown up in the same part of London as Vicious, he knew the accent and the background, and he appears to have relished the darkness of the material. Sid's old bandmate, Johnny Rotten, would eventually disavow the entire film, but as Oldman's Sid says in the film, "He doesn't like anybody. He's a fool." Others who knew Vicious say Oldman got it right. Who else could have come close?

Cox's film isn't a bio-pic in any recognizable form. It skips over where people were born, where they came from, and how they got to be that way (what Holden Caulfield called "all that David Copperfield kind of crap"). Cox is after a mood and a period, an expression of the world that Sid and Nancy inhabited and the way this pair of losers experienced it. I say "losers" without intending it as a criticism, because that's how they saw themselves. To have any hope of understanding them (or punk), it's essential to grasp that the decaying Seventies world they observed around them was so hopelessly broken and "boring" (Sid's favorite word) that being a loser seemed a preferable choice.

The film opens as a grief-stricken Sid Vicious (Oldman) is taken from his room at the Chelsea Hotel in New York to the police station to be questioned. The date isn't provided, but it's October 12, 1978, and Sid's long-time girlfriend, Nancy Spungen (Chloe Webb), is dead in a pool of blood on the bathroom floor. Finally, when one cop gives him a cigarette and asks where they met, Sid answers. "At Linda's", he says.

Cut to London. Again, no date is provided, but it's early 1977. Sid and his buddy, Johnny (Andrew Schofield), are spray-painting everywhere, kicking out a car windshield, and generally raising hell. They end up at the flat of a dominatrix named Linda (Anne Lambton), who has a visitor, an American groupie named Nancy (who may also have worked as a hooker; reports are unconfirmed, and Nancy never gives Sid an answer in the film). Linda and Nancy go hear the Sex Pistols play that evening, and Sid spots her in a pub the next day, where she gets a drink thrown at her by a guy she's trying to hustle. In the unfocused but mesmerizing style in which much of the film unfolds, they discuss drugs, of which they were already both habitual abusers. Then Sid asks Nancy to find him some heroin. He's innocent enough to hand over his money, and she disappears on a bus.

But the seedy world in which these two move is small, and before long they run across each other again, this time when Nancy is unceremoniously abandoned by another potential heroin customer who gets concerned when he spots a police car. Sid and a friend named Wally Hairstyle (Graham Fletcher-Cook) happen to be nearby, and Sid recognizes her. They end up in bed, but when Nancy turns to leave, Sid pulls her back. It's an unexpectedly tender gesture that catches Nancy by surprise, and she stays.

That's pretty much their relationship right there: an occasional moment of tenderness buried under drugs, mess, screaming, anger and more drugs. Occasionally the Sex Pistols actually manage to play a gig, but the band's existence is fragile, and the relationship between Johnny and Sid was obviously volatile even without the major irritant of Nancy. "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" Johnny calls out to an audience one night, when Sid is so stoned he can't even play to the beat. During their American tour, the band's cohesion becomes ever more tenuous even as their reputation is cemented -- and that's without Nancy's presence, since their manager, Malcolm (David Hayman), has judiciously excluded girlfriends from the tour. (Nancy throws a fit.)

After the band breaks up, Sid tries to go solo in New York, with Nancy managing him. (As described in the extras, he really could perform, but Nancy was a disastrous manager.) Mostly, though, they retreat to their room at the Chelsea and do drugs until they're so stupefied that they don't even react when they accidentally set the room on fire. (The FDNY rescues them and extinguishes the flames.) Eventually we work our way back to that fateful night in October 1978, and director Cox and his two stars stage their version of what happened between the co-dependents (since no one really knows).

Chloe Webb's Nancy is an extraordinary creation, with a degree of difficulty every bit as high as Oldman's Sid. Her Nancy is, at every moment, a lying, cheating, foul-mouthed junkie any sane person would run away from as fast as possible. (Her own family has exactly that reaction when Nancy takes Sid to visit them.) But without ever once asking for our sympathy or backing off an inch from Nancy's fingernails-on-chalkboard viciousness, Webb lets you see the damaged little girl inside her. What caused the damage? Who can say -- and it's certainly no excuse. In real life, Nancy Spungen was apparently much, much worse, probably because she didn't have Alex Cox's direction or Chloe Webb's emotional transparency (damaged people being experts at concealment). Certainly there will be viewers who find even Webb's version of Nancy too much to bear. One has to appreciate the dark humor in scenes like the one where Nancy calls her mother from London asking for $200 as a "wedding present", then is outraged that her mother doesn't believe she and Sid got married (which they never did). "They said we'd spend it on drugs!" Nancy howls. "We would", Sid replies, pragmatically.

Cox stages several bravura sequences that any lover of cinema should treasure. The first occurs halfway through the film and is based on Sid's video of the Sinatra classic "My Way". Oldman does his own singing, and his commitment to the performance is unnerving. Another sequence tracks Sid and Nancy with a Steadicam, as they walk, miraculously untouched, through a violent London police bust of a raucous Sex Pistols party aboard a boat that has just docked. The incident is probably fictional, but it's a perfect expression of the bubble into which these two could withdraw. Perhaps the most extraordinary sequence is the one that concludes the film. It would be unfair to first-time viewers to spoil it, but the scene begins when Sid is released on bail and asks the desk sergeant where he can get a pizza. Then he walks out into an urban wasteland (the sequence was shot in Jersey City) and into another world. See for yourself.

Sid & Nancy Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Sid and Nancy was photographed by Roger Deakins, who has since become one of the industry's most respected cinematographers. Best known for his many collaborations with the Coen Brothers, Deakins' work can be found in such a variety of films (including The Company Men, The Reader and Doubt) that it's hard to say he has a signature "style". He suits his camera work to whatever the material needs. In Sid and Nancy, Deakins brings out the squalor and chaos of the punk scene, both in London and New York. It's not just a matter of the urban decay from which these characters originated and to which they naturally seemed to gravitate. They carry these qualities with them, especially as Sid follows Nancy down the ladder of drug addiction. Deakins' gift is that he make can almost anything visually interesting, even places you'd shrink from entering in real life.

MGM's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray is truly impressive, capturing depth and detail in apartments, tour buses, street scenes, subways and clubs in various states of anarchy throughout the film's running time. Black levels are excellent, which is essential given the dark clothing that Sid favors and the nighttime hours that he and Nancy keep. There aren't a lot of bright colors in this world, but when there are, they stand out. Many examples occur in the mock audience featured in the "My Way" video at just about the midpoint of the film. Its closing sequence on the disco-lighting steps is almost a panel from a graphic novel, and it will expose any shortcomings in your monitor's calibration for brightness (black level) and contrast (white level).

Grain is evident throughout the presentation, but it's unobtrusive, well-controlled, natural-looking and film-like. I saw no high-frequency filtering, transfer-induced ringing, compression artifacts or other inappropriate digital tampering.

Sid & Nancy Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

On the 1998 Criterion DVD and the 2000 MGM DVD, the film's soundtrack was presented in Dolby Stereo. For this Blu-ray, the soundtrack has been remixed for 5.1 and is presented in DTS lossless. Like most such 5.1 mixes, this one remains front-centered as far as dialogue and effects are concerned. However, the musical elements are given a much broader and deeper soundstage, and in a movie about musicians (at least in part), that's an important enhancement. Bass extension is powerful enough to give you the feeling of being in a club without damaging anyone's hearing or blowing down walls. The soundtrack is credited to Pray for Rain, with significant contributions by The Pogues, Joe Strummer and others. And, of course, Oldman himself contributes several key vocals.

Sid & Nancy Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

It's an MGM film released on Blu-ray by Fox; so, as has become standard, there's BD-Java encoding, no main menu and no bookmark feature. If you want to take a break during playback, "pause" is your only option.

The two featurettes have copyright dates of 2007. As far as I can tell, they have not previously been released.

• For the Love of Punk (SD; 1.78:1, enhanced; 15:46): A series of interview subjects, most of whom did not participate in making Sid and Nancy, discuss the film, its production, its "rebel" aesthetic and the movement it depicts.


• Junk Love (SD; 1.78:1, enhanced; 15:30): Many of the same interview subjects, plus a few new ones, turn their attention to the real Sid and Nancy. Different perspectives emerge, as least regarding Sid, and at least one alternative theory is offered regarding how Nancy died.


• Theatrical Trailer (HD; 1.85:1; 2:02): The trailer accurately captures the film's raw energy but not it's self-destructive pathos.

Sid & Nancy Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Alex Cox hasn't enjoyed much success as a filmmaker in recent years, and I suspect (and the extras on this disc tend to confirm) that it's because he shares the same rebellious ethic that spawned Sid Vicious and the Sex Pistols. Much of Cox's best work was done in the Eighties, probably as a protest against societies on both sides of the Atlantic that had grown weary of all the negativity and wanted to experience something positive. Among its many other qualities, Sid and Nancy can be seen as Cox's personal protest that shiny happy people aren't to be trusted, whether in Margaret Thatcher's England or Ronald Reagan's America. For Cox as for Sid Vicious, the world is a rusty refuse heap of civilization's leavings, and the best one can do is hope for a kiss and a cuddle (in the film's signature image) as the garbage rains down around you. It may not be the most joyful of messages, but the Blu-ray is highly recommended.