Adults Are Monsters and Kids Don't Stand a Chance

I watched Danny Boyle’s Shallow Grave this week for the first time in probably 30 years, and though it’s obvious (and probably been written about repeatedly), I couldn’t resist the comparisons to another Danny Boyle film, Millions. Both films are about found money, and in both films, the found money reveals the true character of the finders, but in completely opposite ways.

In Shallow Grave, three insufferable Edinburgh yuppies (Ewan McGregor, Christopher Eccleston, and Kerry Fox) find a suitcase of cash next to a dead flatmate, and the money doesn’t corrupt them so much as expose the awfulness already apparent in the opening. I had truly forgotten what absolute sociopaths they were before they found the stash. These aren’t normal, flawed people undergoing a moral collapse; they are mid-90s Thatcherite snobs looking for entertainment. The opening sequence — where they take turns emotionally waterboarding prospective flatmates for sport — establishes that they are basically the main characters of Succession crossed with Clockwork Orange and forced to share a kitchen.

The thing is: They were always going to turn on each other; the cash just raised the stakes and moved up the timeline. It’s a darkly comic, nasty little thriller that looks at three young professionals with a nice flat (My god! That flat is gorgeous! The real crime here is what they do to those floorboards) and good jobs and gleefully decides there is actually murderous greed under the friendship. There’s not one thought given in that movie to splitting the money. Give them a suitcase and a corpse and you get a bathtub, a hammer, and a hole in the attic floor. The money isn’t a MacGuffin so much as it is a mirror being held up to the audience (and yes, I did fantasize about where I would hide the suitcase in my own home — underneath the floorboards of the potting shed).

Then there’s Damian (Alex Etel). Millions, made nearly a decade later, hands a very similar premise to a seven-year-old and gets the opposite worldview. Damian finds a bag of stolen cash and treats it as a moral problem to be solved. That poor, sweet child believes that the obvious thing to do with a loot is give it to poor people because he hasn’t yet had generosity wrung out of him. The boy talks to chain-smoking saints! He wants to do good, while the adults around him — including his own brother, who is already a mini-capitalist grindset influencer running real estate arbitrage on stolen currency - are basically Christopher Eccleston in Shallow Grave, trying to convince him that there’s not enough to go around.

My first read on the two films is that “money corrupts adults, but brings out the best in kids,” but not quite true, is it? The money doesn’t make Damian good. He’s already good. And the money doesn’t make the yuppies rotten, either. It just extracts more of that rot and gives them a hammer to knock out its teeth.

I’m tempted to draw political parallels here, too — Michelle Obama’s “Being president doesn’t change who you are; it reveals who you are” comes to mind — but that minimizes what’s universal about these two films. Shallow Grave says people are greedy. Millions says people can be better than their appetite — and then spends its whole runtime showing you the world’s quiet, relentless campaign to grind that out of a child before he’s old enough to know it’s happening. It isn’t a fairy tale; it’s a origin story for cynicism. The real villain of Millions isn’t the robber coming back for his bag. It’s the mundane, grinding pressure to become “sensible.” Damian will grow up, damnit! Give him twenty years, a crushing mortgage, and an Edinburgh flatmate with a suitcase, and you’re not entirely sure he doesn’t end up standing over a bathtub in a rain slicker, holding the shovel.