Justice Under the Sun

I have a confession to make: I sometimes struggle to tell my McDonaghs apart. I like both of the brothers, John and Martin, which is another way of saying I like the great majority of their films, which include Calvary, The Guard, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Seven Psychopaths, War on Everyone, and In Bruges. However – and please imagine blushing sheepishness appearing on the countenance of your correspondent – if you put a gun to my head and asked me to tell you which were made by John and which were made by Martin, I would almost certainly struggle. They’re both fond of casting Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, their films have a tendency to turn into darkly witty black comedies… do you begin to see the problem?

Having said all that, John has a new film out which doesn’t quite fit that description (while Martin’s imminent one, The Banshees of Inisherin, is apparently a black comedy-drama starring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, so it’s entirely congruent with the McDonagh intersection zone). John McDonagh’s new film is The Forgiven, based on a novel by Lawrence Osborne, which in turn was apparently based on true events (this seems to be a bit tricky to pin down).

It certainly has a very literary sort of feel about it, although to be honest I was expecting to discover it was an adaptation of a book from the 1930s – many things about this tale of dissolute Europeans taking their leisure in Morocco have a vintage touch to them, from the names and attitudes of many of the characters to the string-backed driving gloves which prominently feature in a few key moments. But no: it is set in the present day, complete with jokes about Twitter and odd pop-cultural references (one of which seems likely to earn the Terry Nation estate a few quid: everything is indeed connected, but it’s sometimes odd to be reminded of the fact).

Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain play David and Jo Henninger, an affluent English couple – he is a doctor, she is a moderately successful children’s author – travelling to Morocco to attend a party being held by their wealthy acquaintance Dickie Galloway (Matt Smith) at his palatial desert home. The fellow guests are artists, writers, nobility, sleekly prosperous Americans, together with a swarm of interchangeably glamorous young women, all waited on by an army of Moroccan servants. It does sound rather like the premise of an Agatha Christie novel – the only element of doubt being, who is going to end up murdered?

The twist proves to be that the Henningers arrive having brought their own dead body with them – on a desert road, just outside the estate, they struck and killed a young Arab man apparently only seeking to sell them a fossilised trilobite. (We see the moments before the accident, but for a long time only hear the Henningers’ account of what actually happened.) Henninger pays a sort of lip-service to remorse, but denies any real culpability, despite having had a few drinks before setting out; Jo seems more genuinely concerned about the loss of a young life.

The couple get on with trying to enjoy their weekend, even though word has got around and David is pelted with stones by the local kids while out riding. Dickie does his best to smooth things along with the local police: the subtext to all of this is that one poor local boy is of very little consequence compared to the convenience of Dickie and his assembled guests. Then the boy’s father (Ismael Kanater) materialises out the desert, stone-faced, implacable, demanding that Henninger do the right thing – if nothing else, accompany the father and the body back to their home village for the funeral. It will mean a trip deep into the desert, in the company of strangers who have every reason to wish him ill…

There is something faintly stylised and self-consciously emblematic about The Forgiven from the start – it’s always clear that this is meant to be more than just a story about a clash between cultures and social strata. This never quite topples over into outright clumsiness, but one might still wish for McDonagh to have exercised a slightly lighter touch in both his writing and direction. For a while it’s not clear what the film is going to be about, beyond a forensic portrait of the filthy rich at play in all their awfulness – David Henninger is a self-justifying racist alcoholic, and many of the others are very nearly as bad. (This is a rare example of a film which has earned an 18 certificate in the UK despite not including graphic violence or sexual content – the reason given is the inclusion of drug abuse, but I suspect some extremely strong language and bigoted attitudes will also have played a part in this.)

But the film proves to be something a bit more thoughtful and humane: Henninger sets off into the desert half-expecting the worst, certainly to have cash extorted out of him. But the experience he has exposes new sides to his character, while at the same time the fun and games at Dickie’s mansion are perhaps showing Jo in a new light. The guests continue to thrash about in a swamp of their own moral turpitude, while deeper issues of moral responsibility, retribution and justice are explored far away.

In the end it’s a relatively simple story, though it doesn’t always feel that way at the time: McDonagh has turned it into a thoughtful, very good-looking film, and something of a rarity these days – a serious drama obviously intended for a grown-up audience. The cast respond to this by contributing a strong set of performances, all showing just how good they can be given the right material. Said Taghmaoui is particularly impressive in a relatively small role as an Arab driver who gradually comes to befriend Fiennes’ character; not being having to play someone who is required to symbolise something probably helps his cause a bit.

Some of the film’s oddities eventually prove somewhat explicable – McDonagh opt to open the film by running virtually the entire set of credits over footage of the Henningers arriving in Morocco, but this is mainly to facilitate the ending of the film through a powerful coup de theatre. Others prove a little harder to decode. But the end result is an impressive drama, more measured and less cheerfully provocative than many of his other films. I’m not sure I’ll be putting The Forgiven on as a piece of entertainment in quite the same way that I do The Guard, but this is still a fine piece of film-making.

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The Unlikely Lads

If someone makes a really great movie, does that mean you automatically go and see their next movie? There is something to be said for caution, after all: it does seem like some people only have one really great movie in them – look at Robin Hardy, who did The Wicker Man, or Douglas Hickox, who directed Theatre of Blood. But if someone makes two great movies on the spin that does earn them a pass, I think. Which brings us to John Michael McDonagh, who in 2011 made The Guard, a scabrous black comedy thriller which I loved, and in 2014 made Calvary, a drama which really impressed me. So naturally I went along to see his new film, War on Everyone.

War on Everyone is probably – we will discuss this – a jet black parody of Hollywood buddy movies, with McDonagh’s usual erudition and willingness to rip up the rulebook subtly stirred into the mix. The leads are Bob (Michael Pena) and Terry (Alexander Skarsgard), a pair of Albuquerque police detectives. It is quickly established that these guys take a very flexible view of the whole ‘serve and protect’ ethos as the opening sequence depicts them running someone over solely so they can nick his stuff.

Basically, they show no interest at all in actually, you know, upholding the law, and spend all their time trying to get rich in any way they possibly can: extorting bribes from criminals, ripping off the proceeds of successful bank robberies, and so on. ‘Utterly and enthusiastically corrupt’ only begins to describe these guys. Bob is also a fairly appalling parent, though his wife seems very fond of him, and Terry has various substance abuse problems too.

The arrival in town of Lord James Mangan (Theo James), a well brought-up English criminal mastermind, proves significant for the boys, as he sets about orchestrating a huge heist at the local racetrack. Scenting an opportunity to advance themselves, basically by waiting for the robbery to succeed and then stealing the money from the robbers themselves, Bob and Terry obtrude themselves into Mangan’s business, and things quickly turn quite nasty…

Well, this is obviously much more of a piece with The Guard (loud-mouthed, lairy) than the more thoughtful Calvary, and for all of the film’s mostly-American setting and style McDonagh has brought along one of that’s film’s supporting cast (David Wilmot). But where The Guard had an undeniable warmth and an almost sitcom-like gentleness at times, War on Everyone is more of a full-throttle experience, uncompromising, harder edged. It almost feels to begin with as if McDonagh is prioritising outrageous jokes and situations over remotely credible characterisation – Bob and Terry aren’t just corrupt, they are absurdly corrupt, Bob isn’t a bad father, he’s a ridiculously bad father. And it’s so over-the-top that it’s difficult to engage with the story for a while.

In fact it eventually started to seem to me that War on Everyone might in fact be a surreal, deadpan deconstruction of the classic Hollywood buddy movie, maintaining the general shape and conventions but emptying out all the content and replacing it with such bizarre material that the limitations of the form are thrown into sharp relief.

At one point, for example, Bob and Terry are looking for a suspect who they are basically looking to shake down for some immoral earnings, but they learn he has gone into hiding. In Iceland. So the scene changes to Iceland for literally about five minutes, until they go back to New Mexico, and it’s very strange. Compounding the oddity is a moment where one of them asks the other what their plan is to find the man, who is African-American. The other admits he doesn’t have a plan, but says something to the effect that ‘there can’t be many black people in Iceland, if we just stand here in the street we’re bound to spot him sooner or later.’ And the guy promptly walks past them.

There are parts of War on Everyone which almost move into the ‘a film with something to offend any decent person’ category – and again, you wonder if McDonagh is just looking to satirise the excesses of political correctness, or satirise racism itself, or doesn’t give a damn and is simply going for the most outrageous, near-the-knuckle jokes he can come up with. We see the boys down the police firing range at one point, and sure enough all the practice targets take the form of pictures of black men, some of whom have clearly already surrendered. You can’t fault the director’s willingness to go way out there, but given what’s happened in the US recently, is that really funny?

The film becomes slightly more engaging as it goes on, and McDonagh is too good a director not to make a good-looking film with strong performances and moments along the way – he’ll just switch off the plot for a moment for a dance routine, for instance, and the images and the soundtrack will conspire to create something genuinely great. But the need for a strong conclusion requires the film to become more conventional, and Bob and Terry inevitably discover some remnant of decency within themselves, provoking a heroic confrontation with the bad guys (their motivation for this is somewhat hackneyed).

In the end I would say War on Everyone isn’t really close to the standard of either The Guard or Calvary, and it really is one of the strangest and most difficult to figure out films I’ve seen in a long time. In the end, McDonagh’s intelligence and wit keep it watchable, giving the film a certain level of style – but while the film succeeds because of its style rather than its substance, I don’t really think you can call it a triumph.

 

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Heaven On His Mind

For a while I was slightly aware that this year was looking a bit lightweight, both in terms of the number of films I’d been to see, and their overall quality – I was a good half-dozen behind where I’d been at the same point in 2013. However, having seen five films in the last fortnight, with at least two more coming in the next week, these concerns feel less pressing. It has also helped that most of these movies have been pretty good in one way or another: certainly, none of them has been a total disaster.

Particularly outstanding, in many respects, was John Michael McDonagh’s Calvary. The McDonagh brothers (John Michael’s sibling is Martin, writer-director of In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths) are rapidly establishing themselves as film-makers of real stature, and Calvary may be the best film one of them has yet produced.

Brendan Gleeson plays Father James Lavelle, a Catholic priest in the Republic of Ireland. While hearing confessions one day, an unidentified parishioner reveals that he was abused as a child by another priest, now dead. As an act of retribution, the man now intends to kill Lavelle, reasoning that no-one will bat an eyelid at the death of a guilty priest, but the murder of a good and innocent man as punishment for the sins of another will attract everybody’s attention. The would-be killer thoughtfully gives Lavelle a week to set his affairs in order.

That Lavelle does not immediately consider if he is justified in calling in the police, or contemplate skipping town entirely, tells you something of the tone of Calvary, which is measured and thoughtful throughout. The film follows the priest through the week and observes his interactions with various members of his flock, who are a colourful bunch, as well as his troubled daughter (Kelly Reilly) – she is the product of a marriage which ended prior to Lavelle’s taking the cloth. All the time the viewer is aware that a clock is ticking, but Lavelle concerns himself with a troubled marriage, or a prison visit, or giving solace to a recently-widowed woman: simply with being a priest, in other words.

And it seems to me that this is what Calvary is actually about: the question of the place of religion in the modern world. The setting of the film is clearly contemporary – this is an Ireland ravaged by the wake of the financial crisis, where the church is under siege from accusations of corruption and much worse. As a source of moral authority, Lavelle finds himself constantly challenged and mocked, both by nominal Catholics and atheists, while even his decision to follow his vocation and join the priesthood is criticised by his daughter. ‘Your time has gone,’ he is explicitly told at one point.

This of course feeds into the idea of the film as an allegory for the story of Christ, which it is obviously intended to be (the title and the premise make this clear) – but it’s also a character study of Lavelle, and the question of exactly what motivates him. By potentially risking death, is the priest simply trying to justify his own existence? Does some part of him actively seek martyrdom? The film is intelligent enough not to offer easy answers (nor, indeed, does it entirely resolve its own plot, which some people may grumble about).

The last film from Gleeson and McDonagh was The Guard, to which Calvary bears something of a resemblance – community figure in rural Ireland with troubled female relative, literate script, various oddball supporting characters, somewhat offbeat conclusion – but this is a much more serious and thoughtful film that isn’t afraid to deal with some difficult subject matter. It’s by no means totally gloomy, but it’s certainly not a comedy either.

This is despite the presence of a few actors best-known for comic work: Dylan Moran and Chris O’Dowd both appear, along with Aidan Gillen, Domhnall Gleeson, and various people who were also in The Guard (Gleeson Junior is issued with an unflattering brown wig to reduce his resemblance to his dad). All the performances are good, but dominating the film with a monumental portrayal of simple humanity and decency is Brendan Gleeson. In Lavelle, he and McDonagh have created another richly three-dimensional human being: I fear that the decision to release Calvary at Easter may mean the film is forgotten about when it comes to next year’s awards season, for once again Gleeson is deserving of some sort of recognition for his work here.

But, on the other hand, many people may just regard this as a child-abuse drama about the Catholic church in Ireland, and stay away on principle. This would be a great shame, for Calvary is much more than that. It’s as complete and as satisfying a film as any I’ve seen this year, and managed to be thought-provoking, moving, funny, and occasionally upsetting to watch. Well worth seeking out.

 

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Once Upon A Time In Galway

Maybe it’s the time of year, but here at NCJG it feels like a very long time since there’s been a real belter of a new movie to write about. Not that everything recently has been wholly worthless – far from it – but there hasn’t been the kind of film from which you emerge exhilarated, with your belief in the possibilities of cinema rewarded.

Thankfully this has been rectified with the arrival in Oxford (finally) of John Michael McDonagh’s The Guard, which is following up a smash-hit release in Ireland with a shamefully limited British run. This is a crime movie centred on a tremendous performance by Brendan Gleeson, an actor perhaps best known for playing supporting parts in much bigger movies like Troy and Gangs of New York.

Gleeson seizes with enormous relish on the role of Gerry Boyle, a sergeant in the Garda of west Ireland. Boyle initially appears to be not much more than a simple country copper, unreconstructed, often crass, bigoted (‘I’m Irish, being racist is part of my culture,’ he explains, when someone objects to this), and laid-back to the point of actual moral degeneracy.

However, when a murdered corpse turns up on his patch, Boyle finds himself involved in the hunt for a group of drug traffickers (led by Liam Cunningham and the increasingly ubiquitous Mark Strong). As a result he is somewhat reluctantly partnered with slick and etiquette-conscious FBI agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle). As it becomes increasingly apparent that other Garda members take their corruption rather more seriously than Gerry, the two find themselves increasingly isolated as they close in on their quarry.

It sounds like a fairly routine odd-couple crime thriller, and on one level The Guard delivers this in a very efficient and taut way, albeit with some novelty value due to the Galway setting. However, what turns it into something very special is its tone, which is totally at odds with this: despite being a film about drug smuggling which hinges around a considerable number of deaths, most of them violent, The Guard is more consistently and genuinely funny than most comedies.

Normally I have no time for the lazy reviewer habit of amalgam algebra – you know, describing a film as ‘It’s Groundhog Day meets Murder on the Oriental Express!’ or something ludicrous like that. However, the best description of The Guard I’ve read is something just like this – it’s Father Ted meets Bad Lieutenant. Tight and effective though the story is, the dialogue keeps meandering off in odd directions as characters discuss Russian literature or existential philosophy. Both Boyle himself and the movie ruthlessly undercut and mock any sign of Hollywood posturing from the story or characters. Galway is depicted as a rusticated hinterland populated entirely by oddballs and much of the humour comes from the reactions of unsuspecting outsiders who’ve wandered into this realm and can’t quite believe what they’re seeing and hearing.

Mark Strong is customarily good as a bad-tempered drug baron who resents the poor class of person he meets in the course of his career, but the main foil is Don Cheadle’s character. Cheadle finds an impressive number of different ways of looking gobsmacked at the various pearls of wisdom Gleeson passes on to him, and there’s more than a hint of In the Heat of the Night in the relationship between the two characters. In the end though, he’s very much the straight man and second banana to Brendan Gleeson.

Gleeson turns Boyle into one of the great movie characters of recent years, a fully rounded and believeable – not to mention hugely likeable – figure, despite his various outrageous excesses. The script shows us all sides of the man: his usual cynicism and world-weariness, the integrity buried somewhere deep within, his intelligence (usually masked behind a boorish facade), and his emotions. This latter element is mainly explored through a subplot involving his relationship with his ailing mother, which still manages to be deeply funny as well as moving. (His mother is played by Fionnula Flanagan, who seems to specialise in playing a) mothers and b) people who are either dying or actually dead.) That said, this isn’t a movie which treats human behaviour in a simplistic or mechanical way – we’re left to draw our own conclusions as to why Boyle makes some of the choices he does as the film goes on.

McDonagh’s script effortlessly juggles characters, plot, dialogue, and even genre: at times this film plays like a western, an impression which is helped by Calexico’s twangy score. In the end, though, the sheer quality of the piece transcends this sort of consideration: no matter how you approach it, The Guard is a terrific, hugely impressive movie, stuffed with good performances and pricelessly funny lines and moments, all in the cause of a very solid story. One of the very best films of the year so far.

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