Armadillo
2001
A Collection of Article/Review Excerpts
August 2, 2002
By JULIE SALAMON
You know you are in expert hands when you find yourself engaged by a story about an insurance man.
In ''Armadillo,'' which will be broadcast on A&E tomorrow night, William Boyd, screenwriter and author, has turned the caricature on its head, taking a dull profession and plumbing it for practical consequences and metaphoric possibilities. This pleasurable three-hour television film, elegantly directed by Howard Davies and shown on the BBC in September, was adapted by Mr. Boyd from his satiric novel.
He's the rising star in a firm that evaluates suspicious insurance claims and then tries to negotiate a lower settlement, below the amount for which premiums have been paid. He's called a ''loss adjuster.''
His is cynical work -- sometimes the claims he vigorously pursues are justified -- but Lorimer doesn't seem to be a cynical man. The woman he's infatuated with asks him if his job -- loss adjuster -- means his task is to help people who have suffered a loss by making it more bearable. She's teasing him, but there's a sadness in Lorimer Black's eyes that makes her question plausible.
Suspense films always want you to believe that nothing is what it seems, but usually everything turns out exactly as you might expect. Not so in ''Armadillo,'' where the elliptical plot becomes the mechanism for creating a character with real human possibility -- and coming to understand the toll exacted as he tries to negotiate his way through corporate London.
But even this revelation doesn't play out in a predictable way. He remains attached to his family, with bonds of affection and generosity as well as ambivalence if not shame. (Maybe shame: he tells a doctor treating him for a sleep disorder that his parents, still living, died in a boating accident.) No wonder he falls madly in love with an illusion -- a woman (Catherine McCormack) he sees in the back of a taxi, then again, acting in a television commercial and then again, next to him after he tracks her down.
As Lorimer, or Milo, James Frain brings to the part an attractive mournfulness. He looks like a man who's just holding himself together -- not slick, not like someone trying to help insurance companies weasel out of commitments. You see why he's good at his job. His sad eyes make him seem honest, even when he's lying. Those eyes serve him especially well when he's being compassionate -- when, for example, a blowhard colleague mocks his own son for being a bed-wetter in front of Lorimer. He may work for powerful people, but he can't escape his empathy for the underdog.
Lorimer's search for self takes place against the backdrop of business corruption -- and Mr. Boyd didn't skimp on the scoundrels. Hugh Bonneville plays Torquil Helvior-Jayne, the self-important dim bulb with the bed-wetting son, as an oblivious frat boy. Stephen Rea, overacting with enthusiasm, is entertaining as Hogg, Lorimer's boss, a man with a fondness for dramatic pronouncements.
''Life will always disturb our anticipation,'' he says to Lorimer. ''Armadillo'' takes that notion to heart.
ARMADILLO
A&E, tomorrow night at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time.
Directed by Howard Davies; produced by Sue Birtwistle; executive producer for A&E, Delia Fine; executive producer for BBC, Jane Tranter; Rupert Ryle-Hodges, associate producer; Kevin Lester, editor; original music composed by Richard Hartley. Adapted by William Boyd from his novel.
WITH: James Frain (Lorimer Black), Catherine McCormack (Flavia), Stephen Rea (Mr. Hogg), Hugh Bonneville (Torquil Helvior-Jayne), James Fox (Sir Simon Sherriffmuir), Neil Pearson (Rintoul), Paterson Joseph (Alan) and Trevor Peacock (Marlobe).
James Frain (Hilary and Jackie, The Count of Monte Cristo and Reindeer Games) leads the cast as the hero and the armadillo. Frain's Lorimer Black, a most charismatic and complex character, is living a double life.
On the inside, he's a pretty nice fellow, and he still loves his family. Even when everybody sponges off him, he goes back for more. But with everyone else, he's living a lie.
That he chooses to work in insurance is no coincidence. It's another form of armor. He even collects ancient armor and helmets. And when on business, he wears more armor. "Clothes, attitude and accent" are perfectly keyed to each client, along with small hairpieces and colored contact lenses.
In the working world that this armadillo has managed to make his own, the old school tie and the proper bloodlines are absolute requirements. And while Lorimer doesn't exactly say he is a classmate or the offspring of that aristocratic Black clan, he doesn't deny it, either. It's working for him -- he thinks.
The cast of Armadillo certainly works.
Stephen Rea (The Crying Game) nails Lorimer's boss, George Hogg, a practicing paranoid as endearing as he is eccentric. Hogg talks in a language all his own, and he says a mouthful. "(Bleeps) prefer to do business with (bleeps)," he says. "The problem comes when decent folks, like you, like me, get into it." Decent folks can be (bleeps), too, Lorimer is about to learn.
James Fox (Patriot Games and Remains of the Day) is Sir Simon, the insurance mogul whose title and well-bred manners hide a larcenous heart. It's a role Fox could play by heart.
Hugh Bonneville (Notting Hill) is the toad you love to hate as the detestable but well-born Torquil Helvoir-Jayne. He's the key to the mammoth insurance scam that tests Lorimer's armor and his soul.
Catherine McCormack (Braveheart and Spy Game) is Flavia, the pretty face on the insurance company's TV commercial and the girl of Lorimer's dreams. The problem is, Flavia has a jealous husband.
With Richard Hartley's sprightly -- and original -- music to set the mood, Armadillo moves from its dark opening in the graveyard of mannequins and a hanged man, to the corporate boardrooms and the gentlemen's clubs of London, and on to the country house weekends, where all the "right" people do all the wrong things.
As his sleep doctor diagnoses, this armadillo is really a bit of a knight in shining armor. And a fine, offbeat movie choice, too.
Armadillo, 8 p.m. July 27 on A&E. Grade: A-.
The unfortunate discovery -- Lorimer's first unwitting step into an intricate insurance scam that will tear his neatly knit world apart -- is the opening scene of "Armadillo," a drama adapted by William Boyd from his novel, which has it's American premiere on A & E this Saturday.
Mr Boyd, a writer with a comic touch whose other books include "A Good Man In Africa," "An Ice Cream War," "Brazzaville Beach" and "The Blue Afternoon," has bent the lineaments of his tale of insurance fraud into an allegory for the search for self. "Our modern armor is one of insurance policies and pension funds," Mr. Boyd said in an interview from London. "We hope and think they will protect us if and when things go wrong. But they are steps we take to create the illusion of safety."
Like the armadillo, protected by it's bony-plated skin, Lorimer himself has been hiding within a protective shield. In fact, he is not Lorimer Black at all, but Milo Blocj, a member of an extended family of Gypsies, whose existence he keeps hidden from his friends and colleagues. He suffers from insomnia and visits a sleep clinic in hopes of stopping his troubled dreams.
"I wanted Lorimer in a way to be the ultimate outsider," said Mr. Boyd. "All the armor he is putting on has to do with belonging and becoming part of this English world."
And as that world falls apart, so does Lorimer. His boss, Mr Hogg (Stephen Rea), a domineering character on the cusp of madness, betrays him; a philandering slob of a colleague (Hugh Bonneville), who odiously introduces his son to Lorimer as a "famous bed-wetter," moves into his pristine apartment; Flavia (Catherine McCormack), the love of his young life, turns out to be married; and someone, it seems, is trying to kill him.
In turning his novel into a screenplay, Mr. Boyd said he had "the old problem of having the absolute bounds of generosity of the novel form and having to move it into the compromised and curtailed world of film."
In the novel, Lorimer keeps a diary called "The Book of Transfiguration," in which he records his inner thoughts. "The big change in the film is that "The Book of Transfiguration" is gone, and we have these dream sequences and memories which do the same," Mr. Boyd said.
The dark and swarthy James Frain, who portrays Lorimer Black, is of Irish descent but grew up in Essex, England. His is hardly a household name, but viewers may be familiar with his face from the film "Hilary and Jackie," in which he played the pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim, or in Istvan Szabo's "Sunshine," as Ralph Fienne's Hungarian Jewish brother.
One reason, perhaps, that Mr. Frain isn't better known is that he has deliberately sought out complex characters. "When there is this huge global market being catered to by scripts that are meant to be understood by as many nationalities as possible, you can't have complex characters" in a mainstream movie, he said, adding that "it seems very difficult, to keep possession of your own path."
"Here, we have a theater tradition in which the writer is the most important person," said Mr. Frain, who frequently appears in Shakespearean plays at the Royal Court Theater and with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Mr. Frain, who is 33 and single, is the oldest of eight children. ("Once you've had the first four it becomes self-regulating," he said. "I could change a nappy with one hand by the time I was six years old.") After graduating from high school, he worked odd jobs, including cleaning toilets, before enrolling at the University of East Anglia and graduating with a degree in drama and film. From there, he went to the Central School of Drama and Speech in London until Richard Attenborough plucked him from class and cast him in a small role as a rebellious Oxford student opposite Anthony Hopkins in the 1993 film "Shadowlands."
Mr. Frain sees his character in "Armadillo" as a man who "compartmentalizes himself, who has created a series of different identitiies for himself."
"He is a loner who handles the very different strains in his life by being a different person for all the people he needs to be," he said. "He thinks he's quite in charge. But as the story happens, a series of shocks rattles this protective world. And this suit of armor he has built around himself begins to disintegrate."
Insurance companies have a vested interest to settle claims for as little money as possible, Mr. Boyd said, and loss adjusting is "a slightly shadowy end of the insurance world."
For Lorimer, getting people to take less money is "almost an art form," Mr. Boyd said, quoting one of several astute observations by the manic Mr. Hogg: "Do you know why we are so good at our jobs?", Mr. Hogg asks Lorimer. "Because we understand the secret grammer of the lie."
published July 28, 2002 in The New York Times Television section
Lorimer Black (Rufus Sewell lookalike James Frain) is a loss adjuster for a large company run by George Hogg (Stephen Rea, clearly delighted to be getting his teeth in to such delicious material for the first time in years) who investigates the burning down of a hotel and discovers various levels of corruption within various different companies. And while he tries to work out exactly what is going on, he has to cope with his car being viciously vandalised, a severe beating, the death of his father and a romantic obsession with a woman from a tv advert. Simple black and white drama this isn’t in the slightest.
Whilst all the characters seem unlikeable at first, they all become endearing in their own twisted ways as the drama progressed, and it also served to make it all seem all the more real, another element much missed in tv drama these days. And whilst the all confident Lorimar Black may seem a little too smug to be an endearing leading protagonist, one short scene in the second episode where Lorimar finally breaks down and confesses to his seriously ill father that he has lost his way, is one of the most touching, and oddly eloquent, pieces of drama yet made. From there on in, as Lorimar seeks desperately to make sense of the case, and at the same time find some sort of redemption, and love, you can’t help but hope that everything works out well for him.
Catherine McCormack brings depth back to Black’s almost soulless life as the advertising model Lorimar tracks down after seeing her on tv and gradually falls in love with. James Fox gets to do his privileged member of the upper class 'thang' again, though this time with a more malevolent streak, whilst Neil Pearson pops up as a dodgy but almost tragically ineffective builder.
It’s the chemistry between Rea and Frain, the unpredictability and intelligence of the script, and the for once stylised direction that made it such a pleasure though. If you missed it, it’s available to buy on DVD and video. And even if you didn’t, it’s still worth buying. Yep. That Good.
Unfortunately, the preview tape I was sent from the ABC had sound problems
which no amount of adjusting of the tracking would fix. So I have only seen
— and poorly — the early part of the program.
James Frain plays Lorimer Black, a rather strange loss adjuster for an
insurance company. All is not as it seems with Lorimer, nor with the
insurance company he represents.
It's the kind of program where the viewer is given not so much a puzzle as
bewilderment. The question is not "Whodunnit?" but "What the hell is going
on?".
Whatever it is, it is done with real style and so long as you go with the
flow and don't waste your time trying to analyse the plot — not in the
first episode, anyway — you should find it quite entertaining.
It's pretentious, of course (the copper corrects Lorrimer's pronunciation
of his name and then adds "It's very old Norman French, you know") as
things are that are made for the latte set.
Also in the cast are such talented people as Stephen Rea, Catherine
McCormack, Hugh Bonneville (excellent, as always), Neil Pearson and James
Fox (playing James Fox, of course, but as the Observer noted "he does it so
much better than most").
Adapted by William Boyd from his own novel, the three-part series is
directed with some panache by Howard Davies.
TV WEEKEND; A Romantic Inside a Sharkskin Suit
The film retains much of the book's complexity of plot and richness of character, but it's very much a movie, where interior lives are conveyed with a look or a phrase. It's a romantic film disguised as a thriller, though the main intrigue lies not in the corporate shenanigans but with unraveling the psychology of the main character, the insurance man. He's in his early 30's, darkly handsome and calls himself Lorimer Black.
He disguises himself to do his job -- not because it's really necessary but because Lorimer Black feels more comfortable when he's playing a role. That's the basis for the title: he's shielded himself from the world, like an armadillo, and not just professionally. He actually is someone else, Milo Blocj, child of Eastern European Gypsy immigrants.
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In one life, he's a bright and confident young man on his way up as a high-powered insurance-loss adjuster. In the other, he's a neurotic insomniac and outsider desperately striving to do what the father he loves ordered him to do: leave his refugee family's Gypsy roots behind.
In England's class-conscious society, Lorimer figures the only way to do that is to cloak himself in the armor of social correctness.
Complicated man dons armor
By ANN HODGES
Copyright 2002 Houston Chronicle TV Critic
Texans and armadillos go together like bluebonnets and Hill Country roadkill, but this armadillo is a breed of a curious kind.
He's an Englishman, the star of a three-hour A&E movie.
Author William Boyd (A Good Man in Africa) invented him in a novel he's translated to television.
Armadillo is the title of his BBC/A&E coproduction. He chose it to cajole you into a tale of corporate greed and deception -- the first, no doubt, of many to come post Enron.
Boyd calls it "an acerbic exploration of modern life and the need we all feel to be safe and loved."
It's not so dark and dreary as that may sound. Armadillo does it with a dollop of delicious comedy, even a couple of unexpected guffaws. Director Howard Davies, whose award-winning credits stretch from London to Broadway, neatly balances the humor and suspense for a unique and well-made twist-and-turner.
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C O V E R S T O R Y
An Outsider's Life as a British Insider
By DINITA SMITH
It's a routine workday for young Lorimer Black, a loss adjuster for a British insurance company who specializes in persuading claimants to accept less than they think they deserve. Dressed in an expensive suit, his face framed by thick dark curls, he cheerfully heads for what would seem to be the most prosaic of jobs. But when he arrives at a burned-out construction site to investigate a claim, he finds the owner dead, hanging from a water pipe.
Lorimer's character is based on people Mr. Boyd met some years ago while researching a film, which never got made, about insurance fraud. Mr. Boyd described loss adjusters as "rather dubious people with suitcases who say: 'We are not going to pay your claim. Here's half a million in cash."
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from garbledonline.net:
Armadillo (Series Review, BBC1)
Adapted from his own novel, William Boyd’s Armadillo has to be pretty much the best drama the BBC has screened in the last decade, and what at first may have seemed like just a dull drama about the insurance industry soon developed in to one of the finest studies in to the obscurities of a man, and what masquerades as mundane life, I’ve ever viewed.
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from New York Metro.com:
by John Leonard
Armadillo
(August 3; 9 p.m. to midnight; A&E)
Armadillo, which has been wonderfully faithful to the comic-sinister novel by William Boyd, plunges insurance-company claims investigator and "loss adjuster" Lorimer Black (James Frain) into a sort of Marx Brothers–Kafka pratfall nightmare involving arson, murder, suicide by hanging, a Greek helmet, an actress in a television commercial, and so many family secrets that Black may not even be who he thinks he is, which perhaps accounts for the insomnia that sends him to a sleep clinic. With Stephen Rea as Black's angry boss, Catherine McCormack as the lovely Flavia, Hugh Bonneville as the dreadful Torquil, and James Fox as the owner of them all. Howard Davies directs Boyd's adaptation of his own book, and it's an exceedingly civilized treat.
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an Australian review:
The Guardian October 9, 2002
TV worth watching
Sun October 13 — Sat 19 October
The publicity would have you believe that Armadillo (ABC 8.30pm
Sundays) is a "darkly comic and acute exploration of modern life", but
actually it's a thriller, albeit a very stylish one.
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IMDB link for Armadillo