Shed Your Tears And Walk Away Review

In Shed Your Tears And Walk, documentary film maker Jez Lewis returns to his hometown of Hebdon Bridge, Yorkshire, to try and discover why so many of the people he grew up with are dying of overdoses (drugs, alcohol or both) or else committing suicide. Lewis spends much of his time in the local parks where a significant portion of the town’s population, some still in their teens, many in their early twenties, go each day to get absolutely wasted on their poison of choice. He talks to a great number of people in his attempt to get to the bottom of why such a small town should have become so plagued by a very public waste of human life but the film centres on his friend Cass, seemingly off heroin but destroying himself with alcohol and never seen without a can of Special Brew. Lewis follows Cass being given just two years to live if he doesn’t change and his attempts to turn things around for himself, some abortive, some more successful, but always on that knife edge of reverting back to his old ways at any moment.

Shed Your Tears And Walk Away (the title coming from something Cass’ friend Silly says near the beginning of the film to describe his reaction to his own brother’s death) is an affecting, genuinely upsetting film. It is a stark look at alcoholism and drug addiction and it is made all the more frightening by the fact that Lewis is simply unable to come to a conclusion as to why it has come to this. There are potential explanations certainly, the absence of a Father or significant Father figure plays a reoccurring role in many of the people’s stories. Boredom is rife, opportunities limited, education or ambition nowhere to be found and a sense of alienation hangs permanently in the air. But even collectively, these answers seem insufficient. Several people die during the course of the documentary, including at least one that Lewis introduces us to. He has had five or six funerals in the last year and the parks and public spaces are filled with young men and women drinking and injecting themselves to death. This feels like a plague without a motive and the most frightening thing about that hypothesis is that it is also therefore a plague without an apparent cure.

What was staggering to me watching the film was the way honesty and denial could co-exist. Lewis’ interviewees talk of the epidemic of deaths in the town, talk of the “fucking idiots” who do whatever drugs they are doing as they themselves slur their way through the interviews with the ubiquitous Special Brew firmly in hand at all times. The same answers come up time and again as Lewis asks them why they’re doing what they’re doing. “It’s shit here isn’t? It’s shit. There’s nothing else to do.” Lewis suggests that they could leave the town but they all then respond that they don’t want to leave their mates and a couple of people are honest enough to admit that they are as frightened to leave as they are terrified to stay. This quickly brings you to the issue of people having to help themselves at the end of the day but the film gives the sense that none of these people see a way out. There is a resignation to this being their lot, awareness that it’s grim but the feeling that it can’t change. It’s very easy on the outside looking in to scream at them to just get on a train to anywhere and start again but the atmosphere is stifling and suffocating, their pain utterly palpable and you have a very strange sense that, even if they left the place now, the town would somehow always be with them. This becomes tragically and depressingly apparent when Cass, having left Hebdon Bridge for rehab in London and managed to stay off the drink for several months, produces a can of Special Brew on the train as he takes a dreadfully judged trip back home. His reasoning is that he wants to see the old place to renew his own sense of personal growth and change but you just know he does not have the strength or the will to maintain sobriety in the face of unremitting addiction. This gives weight to the argument that these people are simply addicts and there is nothing more mysterious about it than that. That each individual is an addict is all too apparent and undeniable. But quite why a significant portion of a small town ends up dead or dying from substance abuse is a much tougher and more disturbing question. The ending of the film felt abrupt as I watched it but, thinking about it afterwards (and you will definitely think about it afterwards) there was probably nothing else to show. We have seen these people at their worst, there are apparently no answers or solutions, what is left to say?

Lewis films the whole thing himself and is a presence throughout the entire film. You get a sense of his increasing panic as, more than once, he has to intervene in Cass’s situation to bail him out. He comes across as a man genuinely desperate to get to the bottom of a seemingly insurmountable problem and, even as he threatens to walk away, you just know he won’t be able to do it. I hate describing good films as “depressing” as that immediately puts people off going to see them but there is no way around it, Shed Your Tears And Walk Away is a depressing look at the dark side of a strangely picturesque little town. In a tiny release, the film is only playing at the ICA but, if you can manage it, it is well worth your time. Tragic, heartfelt, moving, it is a difficult watch but a film that will stay with you for a long time.

8/10