(John Michael McDonagh, 2014)
Brendan Gleeson is a great actor. And with John Michael McDonagh he seems to have found a writer-director who understands how best to use him, who sees the depths in him and is able to access them in his work.
Their first film together, The Guard, found the wicked humour in Gleeson, and let him deadpan his way through some hilarious dialogue, while never losing sight of the intelligence in his eyes. Here, McDonagh allows him to brood and think, and his expressive face and clear body language lets the audience in on what he is thinking.
And that in turn allows McDonagh to consider his big themes - faith and atheism, the Church and god, the meaning of religion itself - through his leading man. Gleeson plays a "good priest" in a small Sligo parish. Informed in a confessional in the opening scene by an unseen Parishioner that he will be murdered "Sunday week" as vengeance for the abuse the man suffered at the hands of a Priest as a child, he spends the week seemingly as he normally would. This provides an episodic structure but also allows McDonagh to portray not just the Priest but also his community as he visits troubled parishioners and they visit him.
They include a cynically aetheistic Surgeon (Aidan Gillen), an imprisoned serial killer (Domhnall Gleeson), a former banker who made millions from Celtic Tiger Ireland (Dylan Moran), a cuckolded butcher (Chris O'Dowd) and a few more. Gleeson dispenses advice, tries not to judge, gives the last rites, and argues theology with many. The Catholic Church is fair game in modern Ireland, seen as child abusing, greedy and fascistic, and Calvary reflects this nicely, in the many bitter barbs aimed Gleeson's way by his neighbours.
The most emotional storyline involves the arrival of his daughter (Kelly Reilly) wearing bandages on her wrists from a recent failed suicide attempt, and his attempts to deal with this while his own mortality hangs over him. McDonagh writes terrific dialogue, and that combined with an excellent cast allows the often simplistic archetypes which constitute his characters to burst to life here. They challenge, amuse and touch Gleeson and his own brilliance means that his struggle with their eccentricities and biases is always clear and involving.
McDonagh is a classicist in style, and his film is filled with simple, powerful compositions, artfully contrasting the huge skies and bleak beauty of Sligo with some startling stylised interiors. Mainly though his camera focuses on Gleeson. The big man can carry any film if allowed to, and given this script he works more than a few wonders.
Showing posts with label John Michael McDonagh. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Michael McDonagh. Show all posts
Saturday, 19 April 2014
Monday, 22 August 2011
THE GUARD
(John Michael McDonagh, 2011)
In the years immediately following the release of Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino's influence on cinema was massive. Mainstream action blockbusters got sidetracked by scenes where characters discussed pop culture minutae. Every single low-budget crime film tried to play with pulp conventions by utilising quirky takes on archetypes or infusing stockly generic situations with a sort of realism. It didn't last long, however. Tarantino is hard to get right - he himself has struggled in a couple of works since - and a film can look thoroughly pawltry if it tries and fails to ape his work.
But in another way, Tarantino has been internalized by pop culture. When a film combines crime thriller plot elements with blackly comic dialogue, seemingly random cultural references and some homages to classic or cultish cinema, the audience has a point of reference. Nobody is confused by this mixture. In theatre, Martin McDonagh has made such a mix his own in a series of savage, hilarious plays mainly set in the West of Ireland. He softened that sensibility for his first feature, In Bruges. Now his brother, John Michael McDonagh makes his debut as writer-director, and there is a definite family resemblance.
The Guard is a crime thriller with more laughs than thrills, and adds to its quietly Tarantino-esque pleasures an inimitably Irish viewpoint which gives it a refreshing, soulful quality also present in In Bruges. It shares a star with that film, and Brendan Gleeson is terrific here; suggesting the depth and ambiguity of his Galway Police Sergeant inside his first scene but always funny, charismatic and entertaining to watch. He also has abundant chemistry with Don Cheadle as the fish-out-water FBI Officer stunned by his attitude.
The Guard, Cheadle aside, is incredibly Irish, as if McDonagh set out to reflect the moods and variety of the country and its people in his film, which is melancholy yet jolly, coal black yet hilarious, violent yet tender, warm yet stoic in the face of strong emotion, rambling, foul-mouthed, literate yet cinematic, bawdy, witty and even a little moving.
It has a sure feel for the landscape and language of the Irish West, bleakly empty and beautiful and filled with slyly, dryly funny eccentrics. McDonagh fills it with big 'scope images of the yawning skies above Connemara and its expanses of green stretching off to the horizon, his figures isolated in corners of the large frame. The obvious Leone reference is underlined by the Morricone pastiche of the soundtrack, which in turn points up the big Western-style moral choice of the climax, when Gleeson's Boyle has a "man's gotta do" moment.
Perhaps surprisingly, the Western echoes fit snugly alongside McDonaghs terrific dialogue, which allows Drug smugglers to quote Nietzsche, reference Bertrand Russell and ponder the lyrics of "Ode to Billy Joe", while Boyle himself discusses Gogol and listens to Chet Baker.
The supporting cast is excellent, with such reliable actors as Liam Cunningham and Mark Strong offering casually great work and plainly loving McDonagh's writing.
In the end, the funny stuff stops and there is gunplay, death and reckoning. Yet somehow, McDonagh makes that work too. His first film is a rousingly satisfying experience and suggests that he may have a fine, fascinating career awaiting him.
In the years immediately following the release of Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino's influence on cinema was massive. Mainstream action blockbusters got sidetracked by scenes where characters discussed pop culture minutae. Every single low-budget crime film tried to play with pulp conventions by utilising quirky takes on archetypes or infusing stockly generic situations with a sort of realism. It didn't last long, however. Tarantino is hard to get right - he himself has struggled in a couple of works since - and a film can look thoroughly pawltry if it tries and fails to ape his work.
But in another way, Tarantino has been internalized by pop culture. When a film combines crime thriller plot elements with blackly comic dialogue, seemingly random cultural references and some homages to classic or cultish cinema, the audience has a point of reference. Nobody is confused by this mixture. In theatre, Martin McDonagh has made such a mix his own in a series of savage, hilarious plays mainly set in the West of Ireland. He softened that sensibility for his first feature, In Bruges. Now his brother, John Michael McDonagh makes his debut as writer-director, and there is a definite family resemblance.
The Guard is a crime thriller with more laughs than thrills, and adds to its quietly Tarantino-esque pleasures an inimitably Irish viewpoint which gives it a refreshing, soulful quality also present in In Bruges. It shares a star with that film, and Brendan Gleeson is terrific here; suggesting the depth and ambiguity of his Galway Police Sergeant inside his first scene but always funny, charismatic and entertaining to watch. He also has abundant chemistry with Don Cheadle as the fish-out-water FBI Officer stunned by his attitude.
The Guard, Cheadle aside, is incredibly Irish, as if McDonagh set out to reflect the moods and variety of the country and its people in his film, which is melancholy yet jolly, coal black yet hilarious, violent yet tender, warm yet stoic in the face of strong emotion, rambling, foul-mouthed, literate yet cinematic, bawdy, witty and even a little moving.
It has a sure feel for the landscape and language of the Irish West, bleakly empty and beautiful and filled with slyly, dryly funny eccentrics. McDonagh fills it with big 'scope images of the yawning skies above Connemara and its expanses of green stretching off to the horizon, his figures isolated in corners of the large frame. The obvious Leone reference is underlined by the Morricone pastiche of the soundtrack, which in turn points up the big Western-style moral choice of the climax, when Gleeson's Boyle has a "man's gotta do" moment.
Perhaps surprisingly, the Western echoes fit snugly alongside McDonaghs terrific dialogue, which allows Drug smugglers to quote Nietzsche, reference Bertrand Russell and ponder the lyrics of "Ode to Billy Joe", while Boyle himself discusses Gogol and listens to Chet Baker.
The supporting cast is excellent, with such reliable actors as Liam Cunningham and Mark Strong offering casually great work and plainly loving McDonagh's writing.
In the end, the funny stuff stops and there is gunplay, death and reckoning. Yet somehow, McDonagh makes that work too. His first film is a rousingly satisfying experience and suggests that he may have a fine, fascinating career awaiting him.
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