Sympathy vs. Facts in <i>I Swear</i>

The infamous incident that likely won Michael B. Jordan a pity Oscar for Sinners was caused by John Craig Davidson, the Scottish activist and campaigner for understanding Tourette’s syndrome, who is the subject of the new biographical drama I Swear. When Jordan appeared on stage at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) ceremony, Davidson let loose a racial epithet that caused international embarrassment. Davidson was present because I Swear had been nominated for several BAFTA prizes, eventually winning two, no doubt to reward the film’s sympathetic presentation of his condition. Eventually, commiseration crossed the big pond, linking the BAFTAs and the Oscars as bleeding-heart organizations.

But I Swear isn’t good enough to explain why. As we live through an epidemic of irresponsible political speech, I Swear could help us comprehend reckless or uncontrolled statements. Instead, writer-director Kirk Jones uses Davidson’s story for a well-intended pity party. Born in Galashiels, Scotland, young Davidson (played by Scott Ellis Watson) first exhibited tics and outbursts at age twelve. These episodes stress his parents’ uneasy marriage and prompt the boy’s attempts at suicide.

At age 25, Davidson (played by Robert Aramayo) is prescribed unhelpful medication. A friend’s mother, gregarious mental health nurse Dottie (Maxine Peake), helps him cope with his disorder, easing him into adult self-reliance. He gets employment at a community center alongside a tolerant caretaker (Peter Mullan) and eventually develops the confidence to advise other youths suffering from the same condition.

Sometimes I Swear seems to take place in Billy Elliot-land, resembling movies that give easy answers by seeing individual problems as social issues. “I can’t help it!” Davidson cries. “An impulse in my brain makes me say things, do things.” Avoiding therapeutic explanations works best; the emotional peak occurs when Davidson leaves home, telling his mother, Heather (Shirley Henderson), “You need a break, I need a break.”

The maternal contrast between Dottie and Heather is a fresh dilemma. Peake and Henderson offer the behavioral subtlety and credibility of a Mike Leigh film, where tics and compulsions offer psychological insight. “You’re just imagining it,” Heather consoles her son and herself, while Dottie insists, “If you do anything you can’t help, you don’t need to apologize. It’s the apology I can’t stand.” Their different styles of forbearance are more interesting than what Davidson endures from strangers at a dance club, or when he is beaten after a woman is offended by his misunderstood outburst.

Moving in with Dottie’s family, Davidson sees his image in a distorted bathroom mirror — an unexpected metaphor for the film’s sensitive-social-worker approach. Davidson’s Virginia Woolf–style attempt to drown himself and his reading of Shakespeare in a classroom — oddly enough from a Yeats textbook -- are early clues of Jones’s pathos. (Jones is known for sentimental comedies Everything’s Fine and My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2). I Swear needs Mike Leigh’s more rigorous dramatization of the language and culture that Davidson intuits from his environment -- as a soccer lad who learns to express himself in a rough-and-tumble fashion. The sight of Aramayo’s trudging in an oversized jumper jacket and baggy trousers, flinching his Tarantino-esque lantern jaw, suggests that swearing might be understood as an outlet of profane and hidden frustrations as well as culture habit.

Jones leaves us clueless about why Davidson, when awarded the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire from Queen Elizabeth in 2019, blurted, “F*** the Queen!” Asking viewers to pity Davidson rather than scrutinize his speech -- rethinking its roots and social connotations -- is the same error that the tabloids made when jumping to simplistic accusations of racism after the BAFTA incident.

I Swear concludes as typical liberal sanctimony when Davidson works with the Scottish Border Community Trust and lectures a Tourette’s Weekend convocation, “You’re the majority, you’re not a minority. The problem is not Tourette’s, the problem is people don’t know enough about Tourette’s.” It’s possible that the 1989 documentary titled John’s Not Mad was misguided and that the native wit to reduce an unpleasant situation — whether an unhappy marriage, a nice lady with a terminal diagnosis, or black American actors promoting a fatuous race movie — to its vulgar essence is a challenge to PC niceties. The film is liberal soft soap.

Feel-good commiseration can’t be trusted. It went haywire in Hollywood, shifting from Davidson to Jordan, the object of Davidson’s outburst, merely to appease self-righteousness. It is smug, unscientific, and dishonest.

But Davidson’s reunion scene with his mother, two people much smaller than the problem that separates them, is a moment of uncommon, unforgettable tension.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10ynpduiRpM