Child Chain Smoker (2007) (TV)

User Rating:

7.0/10   

Director:

James Routh

Release Date:

28 June 2007 (UK)

Genre:

Documentary

Plot:

Joel is 13 years old, and has been smoking since he was 8. Filmmaker James Routh follows his progress as he tries to give up his habit. |

Plot Keywords:

Smoking | Addiction | Cigarette | Cigarette Smoking | Child Smoking Cigarette

Cast

Helen Nelson	...	Herself - Community nurse
Emma Parker	...	Herself
Joel Parker	...	Himself
Pam Parker	...	Herself
James Routh	...	Himself - Narrator

Runtime:

65 min (including commercials)

Country:

UK

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Filming Locations:

Cumbria, England, UK

Company:

Twenty Twenty Television

The smoking is a distraction from a bigger social investigation that Routh never really gets down to doing

Joel is only a teenager in Salford but he has been smoker for many years and has developed a fifteen-a-day habit. His attendance record at school has dropped below fifty percent. Filmmaker James Routh first met Joel when he was ten, now he is thirteen, James spends half a year with Joel and his mother Pam, looking at the smoking and his wider life.

The title suggests that this film is going to be all about smoking and the timing (in the week leading up to the UK smoking ban) only confirmed this. Accordingly James Routh focuses on how smoking affects Joel but in all honesty there are much bigger problems in Joel's life than the fact that he happens to smoke. We see him refusing to go to school, playing video games late into the night, hanging around on the street, talking about his asbo and generally just being anti-social and trying his hardest to remain outside what the majority of us would call "society". His mother Pam isn't really bullied by Joel but has simply given up fighting him (if she ever did) and has now resorted to making excuses and self-pitying.

Now, I'm a liberal in regards my world view – or at least I thought I was. I will happily talk about helping people out of poverty and empowering the disenfranchised but no such thoughts were anywhere in my head while watching this film. In fact all I really felt was despair about parts of our society. I'm not sure if that was the point of Routh's film, in fact I doubt it was because his focus is relentlessly on the smoker, trying to link it to how Joel is and looking at the effect of smoking on him and his family. However I gotta say that I found this all quite distracting because nothing I saw here made smoking significant. What jumped out more was the total lack of leadership from his mother (a woman who refuses to stop smoking to help Joel because she feels like it would be him dictating to her – although she ignores the fact that he dictates everything else to her and ignores her!). This has brought about a lack of discipline that has seen him "lost" onto the streets and seemingly spending his day p1ssing his time away. Remembering he is a very young-looking thirteen, it is depressing how much aggression and arrogance Joel already has and it does seem like he is only going to get worse as he gets older.

The liberal side of me did have some sympathy for Joel but not to the point where I blamed him on "the system". His mother is a failure. I want to be nice and balanced but she simply has failed her child and it is sad to see. You can see she knows it as she even defends herself half-heartedly and wallows in remorse. Obviously the estate has a part to plan but it is hard to blame environment totally when you can see nothing trying to fight against these factors. I appreciate that Pam herself has been brought up in this world and that society must tackle these traps but when you see the opportunities given to Joel and Pam (taxi to a special school, benefits, housing benefit etc) you have to wonder when they are going to start making some effort from their side.

Routh continues to focus on the smoking but in this regard the film is actually not that good as it just seems like a side effect of a much bigger problem, rather than a significant cause for anything else. As such the film is not actually that good but yet at the same time it is an unflinchingly depressing look at a part of society that is hard to really defend. Those seeing such people as a "disease" will take it as confirmation that they were right while the majority of viewers will just feel a sense of hopelessness.