There’s an overhead shot of a schoolyard fight to take in the full array of onlookers that starts to circle around John Davidson (Robert Aramayo) and another kid at Galashiels Secondary School as they start to spar in “I Swear,” the kind of perspective that wouldn’t have been possible the time in which the latest hearttugger from “Waking Ned Devine” director Kirk Jones is set in the early 1980s when there were no such things as drones. A routine scene to show how badly bullied the real-life Davidson was when he developed a bad case of Tourette’s Syndrome as a teen suddenly has a new way to understand it as one can see the crowd closing in and it becomes indicative of a film that deftly deploys more sophisticated language to see certain conditions differently than the past.
While Jones can’t resist poking a bit of fun at the widely mocked condition, first introducing Davidson leaving a first impression with Queen Elizabeth by dropping the F-word while picking up a prize for his advocacy work, “I Swear” leads with compassion as it follows the young man from Scotland who dreams of being a professional soccer goalie slowly descend into a private hell with involuntary verbal tics and gesticulations he or anyone else around him can comprehend. Punished with lashes by the headmaster for his outbursts at school and even placed in front of the fireplace to think about what he’s done by his kindly mother Heather (Shirley Henderson) when his disruptions at dinner become too much to handle, there is no one who can properly diagnose him, nor does he even have the understanding himself to ask any of the right questions. However, after his days of playing soccer come to an end, a run-in with Murray (Francesco Piacentini-Smith), a friend from the field, leads to an invitation from his mother Dottie (Maxine Peake) to stay for dinner and eventually much longer when she has a background as a mental health nurse and starts seeing in John what others cannot.
Davidson has actually been the subject of multiple documentaries covering his formative years (1989’s “John’s Not Mad” and 2002’s “The Boy Can’t Help It”), clips of which accompany the end credits which you’ll definitely want to stay for, and he has credited them with almost instantly alleviating at least some of the tension he faced in his every day life when every interaction felt like a timebomb, worrying he could offend with his language or worse, smack someone unconsciously when he had no control over his faculties. “I Swear” has the same effect when the condition isn’t any more comprehensible, but the failures of a generally well-meaning support system immediately around John are brought into stark relief and it takes Dottie’s modest medical expertise and loads of personal empathy to properly engage him, gradually opening the doors for others to do the same.
Peake and Peter Mullen, who makes a welcome appearance as a community center manager who takes a shine to John when he becomes his assistant, offer the kind of instant soul that make a lighthearted drama such as this particularly tender and Aramayo acquits himself well as John, never overplaying the condition or the torment it causes, but instead radiating the confusion of it. Jones does ask him to do a little too much when stretching out the story from 1983 when Davidson was reaching his teens to roughly around the present day when he’d be in his fifties and a little sprinkle of grey in the 32-year-old Aramayo’s hair doesn’t convince that he’s anywhere middle age for a sequence that comes across as a sweet but unnecessary postscript. (The passage of time also results in a strange story hitch more generally when Dottie’s decision to take John in is inferred to be part a response to terminal cancer diagnosis she has that never rears its ugly head in any form as the years pass.) Nonetheless, Jones utilizes time wisely in another way when advances in addressing Tourette’s both medically and culturally enable a look back at how hard John had it with fresh perspective and with the director’s sensitivity always his finest attribute as a filmmaker, “I Swear” finds the right words for a condition that has people struggling so mightily with them.
“I Swear” will screen again at the Toronto Film Festival on September 9th at the Scotiabank at 3 pm and September 11th at 3:30 pm at the TIFF Lightbox.