Michael Fassbender is so convincing as Connor he breaks your heart.
Life as a 15-year-old girl can get pretty sour especially when you live in the projects with a wayward mother and bratty little sister. Mia is a fatherless girl with no direction being raised by an equally lost and confused single parent. Their council flat (British term for housing projects) in Essex is in a bleak dreary corner of the world where no future is obvious. Mia has pervasive loneliness that is endemic in a life of a school drop out with no friends and prone to fights with other teenagers. With no job, no friends, no stability it is no wonder that Mia is seeking a way out. She thinks dancing might be it but without any encouragement she is left to her own devices to make that dream come true.
The same old same old routine of Mia’s existence continues compounded with underage drinking and more fights. One morning she is dancing in the kitchen of her flat preparing for an audition as a dancer at a local club. While Mia does her best hip hop move to the TV she is interrupted by a stranger in the kitchen. Her mother has brought home a new boyfriend, Connor, who responds by not mocking her. One gets the sense that this may be the first time that anyone has not ridiculed Mia for who she is and what she does. Things start to brew between Mia and Connor when he moves into the flat. For the first time in her life an anxious and tense girl with with a need for protection and safety only a father can provide is lured into an assault situation. The council flat is prime breeding ground for manipulation, coercion, and what psychologists call “love bombing”. Show a person starved for love an unending stream of affection and you are their puppet master.
Fish Tank is not the first film to depict the uneasy and often creepy love triangle that can form when a parent brings home a new partner. Yet the film does not go to a formula or stereotype of either a secret assault against someone’s will or duplicity committed on the part of a teenager or young adult. Rather, Fish Tank remains an unspoken story about what happens when a fatherless love starved girl enters puberty and seeks a paternal bond. Mia is already dealing with an out-of-control neglectful parent so the instant Connor displays patience, encouragement, and most of all … care … Mia is sucked in to a vortex of mixed affection and crossed boundaries.
Connor initially related to Mia as a kid he likes but a 15 year old girl is developing into a woman and being a man in his late 20’s/early 30’s the fact is not lost on Connor. The family outing at the lake starts the tumble down the road of forbidden attraction. Connor encourages Mia out of her shell and when she hurts her foot he tends to her immediately while her mother could care less. Then he carries her on his back because she can’t walk.
These acts of kindness are all the things that a father does except Connor is not Mia’s father because if she were a few years older she could be his lover instead of her mother. One can see how the transition to a bond between them is dangerous because of Mia’s love starved existence that makes her especially susceptible to falling under the spell of anyone who would show her attention. There is both a mixture of impending danger and sweetness when Connor carries Mia to her room after she falls asleep on the couch one night.
If anyone remembers being an adolescent and its cocktail mix of emotions the combustible probability of a fatherless girl being cared for by a handsome older man is akin to dynamite. Yet this movie, frame by frame, is compelling to watch even if we all know where the relationship is leading. Connor knows it too and in that he is the concerned predator that Mia’s mother just doesn’t see.
Then a boy close to Mia’s age appears and Connor’s reaction is a combination of protectiveness and possessiveness. Their boundary challenged personalities begin to collide when Mia shows up at Connor’s work with her teenage boyfriend asking for money to eat. A blend of going to daddy and making her emotional lover jealous comes to play. Mia’s boyfriend who begins to show the affection and encouragement is creeping into Connor’s territory and he knows it.
This is the precipice to the disturbing lines that are crossed next. All this time Mia is practicing for her audition as a dancer in a club. Connor knows all about it. So does the boyfriend but it does seem that Connor knows that the job is for an exotic dancer not a hip-hop one. He fails to warn her or alert his mother.
Later that night at dinner while watching television Connor’s jealousy reveals when he asks Mia if the teenage boy he saw her with that day is now her boyfriend. A father would ask out of concern. Connor asks because he wants to possess her first. When Mia’s mother who is lightly drunk goes upstairs to the bedroom Connor doesn’t follow her. The predator factor rises one night when Connor asks Mia to show him her dance routine that she has been practicing. She obliges and he asks her to sit next to him on the couch. Her disinterested mother is upstairs asleep and it never dawns on her how perilous it is to leave her daughter and boyfriend alone together. Premeditation looms.
When the line is crossed between Connor and Mia he is clearly in competition with her teenage boyfriend. The dialogue says it all: I bet it doesn’t feel this way with that boy of yours.
What follows next is that Connor abandons the family the next day sending Mia into a tailspin of confusion and distress. She has lost a father and a lover in the same person. Mia spends the day calling Connor on his cell phone and eventually shows up at his house. Connor is shocked and embarrassed and tries to hide Mia from the neighbors. Then he finally says and does something that makes sense: You know I like you but you’re 15 years old. Yes, Connor and you know what that means, you committed statutory rape. What is even sicker is that all this time you had a secret wife and daughter. Why weren’t you being a father to your own kid who needed you too? This is where the betrayal layers deepen because it leads to the possibility that Connor’s intentions were never sincere even at the beginning. He always wanted something and managed to stay likable and convincing that he was otherwise.
Connor drives Mia to the nearby train station and kisses her good-bye. By this time one may not know whether to cry over a failed May-December romance or call the police on Connor and get Mia counseling. But after that goodbye there is frightening revenge that Mia takes out on Keira, Connor’s five year old daughter. She impulsively kidnaps the child and throws her in the water, almost causing Keira to drown.
It is an an Electra complex moment of its own as Mia punishes Connor’s daughter because she has him as a father. Some father though. If the teenage boyfriend was Connor’s sexual rival then Connor’s daughter is Mia’s paternal love competitor. When Mia returns Connor’s daughter home late that night she walks home in the dark only to have Connor pull up beside her on the road. He chases her into a field and punches her before walking away. Heartbreaking, soul crushing, and cruel. Connor defends his daughter but there is no one to protect Mia. He brought it upon himself and it made me shudder in sympathy with Mia.
So what is next after all this drama? Mia decides to run off with her teenage boyfriend to Wales. Her mother doesn’t care enough to hug her and say goodbye or even ask her to call when she arrives at her destination. Her little sister hugs her while saying she hates Mia. As Mia looks behind her while being driven away you feel relief that she got out. But you wonder if this really is the end of Mia and Connor. The final moments can be seen as asking a new question: will Mia have a Sweet Sixteen?