THE STORY – John Davidson grows up with Tourette syndrome in 1980s Scotland. He faces a society that does not understand his condition. He eventually becomes a campaigner to increase public awareness.
THE CAST – Robert Aramayo, Maxine Peake, Shirley Henderson, Peter Mullan & Scott Ellis Watson
THE TEAM – Kirk Jones (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 120 Minutes
John Davidson (Robert Aramayo) is just a normal teenager growing up in 1980s Britain who enjoys playing football and hanging out with his school friends. Then, one day, he starts developing tics, small physical ones at first, but they quickly become larger and more verbal. Eventually, he receives a diagnosis of Tourette’s Syndrome, an incurable condition that manifests itself in these kinds of uncontrollable tics. John becomes unable to suppress them, leading to an embarrassing mistake in a soccer match when a scout is there to see him, and to his suspension from school. Neither his family, educators, nor medical professionals truly understand Tourette’s, and without a cure, John is stuck living at home with his mother (Shirley Henderson) well into his young adulthood. When a friend’s mother, Dottie (Maxine Peake), a nurse dying of cancer, meets him again as a grown man, she throws herself into finding any treatment that exists to help him live as normal a life as possible. This sets John on an unexpected path, eventually leading him to become an advocate for those living with Tourette’s, working to create a better world for himself and others.
From afar, Kent Jones’s “I Swear” looks like a typical latter-day British kitchen sink drama: A young man with issues gets left behind by society, has a reckoning, and emerges a changed man. While the original kitchen sink dramas back in the 1950s-1960s were animated by a more palpable anger, Jones still builds the film on a foundation of profound displeasure with the way society treats people with Tourette’s (and by extension, all serious mental conditions), while keeping his aim on building a bridge of empathy and understanding. The tension between these two impulses results in a powerful piece of storytelling, even if its cinematic style isn’t anything to write home about. Jones directs with a restrained elegance that allows for even the most clichéd moments to ring true. Instead of pushing the film towards sentimentality, he keeps it grounded in realism, trusting his actors to bring his screenplay to believable life without overplaying things to the point where John’s story feels like an overdone version of itself.
Indeed, the film’s lead performance is the biggest reason to see “I Swear”. In the lead role, playing John for the bulk of the film from his elder teenage years through adulthood, Aramayo gives the kind of performance that never feels like that of a performer playing a role. He feels completely natural throughout, with John’s physical and verbal tics organically coming from within him. Nothing feels put on, nor does it feel effortful. Aramayo seamlessly slides into John’s skin and lives there, inviting the audience to do the same. His BAFTA Award win for this performance was no fluke; this is character acting of the highest order, a performer subsuming themselves to a character so thoroughly that you can hardly tell where one ends and the other begins.
The performance also offers much more than just a collection of impressively deployed tics. Aramayo finds ways to shade every moment onscreen so we can feel when John’s frustration is directed inward rather than outward, an important distinction that adds depth to what’s on the page. As time goes on and more people get used to John’s tics, Aramayo shows how that acceptance changes him; he no longer holds himself so stiffly, his apologies sound like they come from the heart instead of a knee-jerk sense of politeness, and he sounds more at peace with himself despite the palpable loneliness that haunts him throughout the film.
Aramayo is so good that even if nothing else in the film was at his level, “I Swear” would still be well worth watching. Thankfully, he’s surrounded by a wonderful ensemble of veterans who know exactly how to support him. As John’s at-the-end-of-her-rope mother, Henderson walks a very fine line, unapologetically treating her son like a little child throwing a temper tantrum because it’s the only way she knows how to deal with him. Henderson never hides the effort it takes Mrs. Davidson to spend even one minute in John’s presence, bravely earning the audience’s sympathy even while engaging in some rather unmotherly behavior.
Aramayo’s fellow BAFTA nominee, Peter Mullan, delights as the community center facilities manager who takes John under his wing, providing some heartfelt comedic bits that give the film a nice lift in its second half. Peake, meanwhile, gives a performance that will go down in history as one of the great movie moms. The no-nonsense warmth she brings to the role is instantly endearing, a perfect reflection of a woman whose only thought while dying of cancer is, “How can I help this young man who is so clearly struggling?” The film sees her as just as much of a hero as John for how much she selflessly helps him, but Peake never portrays her as a saint, just a woman trying to help someone when she has nothing else left. Peake plays Dottie as a woman longing for something beyond the tragedy forced upon her, resulting in a heartwarming portrayal of the kind of person we should all strive to be.
The film’s ultimate message reaches for a general kindness towards others, which loses some of the film’s thrillingly lucid specificity but feels especially nice at a time when niceness feels in such short supply. It’s a powerful message, though, and put forward in a way that never begs for sympathy but gets it anyway. That is much easier said than done, and Jones’s ability to do so speaks well to his instincts as both a writer and director. In the end, though, it’s the cast that deserves the most credit for making “I Swear” so entertaining to watch. The story, while unique enough in its presentation of Tourette’s, follows the same patterns as any number of other feel-good disability dramas, but all the actors are so believably in touch with their humanity, in all its messiness, that they make the material sing.
