Scrapper Review: The Twee Project

Charlotte Regan’s Scrapper is a baffling clash of two incompatible visions. The film is partly presented as a glum bit of kitchen-sink realism, tracing the hard-knock life of 12-year-old Georgie (Lola Campbell) in the aftermath of her mother’s death. But it’s also pitched as a twee indie dramedy, showing that Georgie has gotten by on her own in much the same way that so many quirky movie children have had to function like miniature adults.

At its most serious, the film watches as Georgie cleans her cramped apartment before then going off with an older boy, Ali (Alin Uzun), to steal bike parts and sell them for money. She’s never known her father, Jason (Harris Dickinson), and then one day he crawls over her backyard fence and demands to stay with her. From such moments, Scrapper swings discordantly toward the cutesy, as when Georgie tries to fool social services by creating a fake uncle named Winston Churchill by playing recordings solicited from the cashier at a corner store.

Scrapper is at its worst when its indulging its more precious instincts. Take the documentary-style interviews, shot in smaller aspect ratios, with Georgie’s acquaintances, like the neighborhood mean girl who voices her opinion while flanked by her color-coordinated entourage. Another scene visualizes Georgie and Ali’s speculation about what Jason does, with cutaways showing him dressed as a vampire and then as a gangster. Even in a film that foregrounds its artifice in pastel colors, these gags are, at best, intrusive and awkward.

Worse, they erode whatever sense of social realism that Regan is striving for, as the film is packed with such generic scenes as the characters playfully fleeing authority and imagining dialogue for people they see across train tracks. Which isn’t to say Scrapper is squandering any particular depth to its characters. Georgie’s and Jason’s personalities and personal flaws are more stated aloud than naturally portrayed, leaving precious little room for development or conflict. It’s only a matter of time before they settle into their happy ending like a warm bath.

There’s some potential in the depiction of Jason threatening to expose Georgie’s scam to social services in order to get her to let him stay with her. But, then, it’s as if Scrapper remembers that being dramatic or complicated or human isn’t its endgame and it commences to further sand down anything that might be construed as a sharp edge to the characters.

That’s what ultimately separates Scrapper from, say, The Florida Project, which injects moments of levity and wonder into its depiction of an impoverished community and in ways that make those moments feel like natural extensions of the environment. By contrast, Scrapper is chockablock with flights of fancy that aren’t securely grounded in the realities of life, effectively suffocating whatever it might have to say about grief, relationships, and class.