Showing posts with label Brendan Gleeson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brendan Gleeson. Show all posts

Saturday, 12 April 2014

There are other kinds of violence

This is a review of Calvary (2014)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

13 April (the day on which Samuel Beckettt claimed to be born, which was also Good Friday that year...)

This is a review of Calvary (2014)

In two parts, which deliberately balance, these words from Saint Augustine appear on the screen at the beginning of Calvary (2014) (Irish writer Samuel Beckettt clearly refers to these words from St Augustine (from his Confessions*) in Waiting for Godot**) :

Do not despair; one of the thieves was saved.
Do not presume; one of the thieves was damned.


John Michael McDonagh’s careful, challenging film*** is a meditation, which loses us as to time (despite the fact that the days of the week count down), but roots us in space – almost in the way that The American (Tom Berenger) causes ‘Bull’ McCabe (Richard Harris) to fixate upon the piece of land that gives The Field (1990) its title (a film in which Gleeson appears). Brendan Gleeson, as Father James, seems to live more, which is arguably also on a symbolic level, in the week in which we are with him than the running-time suggests is possible, just as The Field painfully evokes an eternal struggle in a small compass.




Subtly, but in every scene (or group of scenes, or the principal scene for the day of the week), there is a base colour – almost as if signifying the Biblical rainbow that the Book of Genesis tells us was established as a covenant between Man and God (9 : 13 (to prevent a further flood and another Noah)), and possibly chiming with Stockhausen’s colour-scaped composition Licht, comprising an opera for each day of the week.

Thus, the tinges in Fr. James’ beard foreshadow his daughter’s hair, and, when she comes into his room and his dog Bruno is lying on the bed and he is reading on a chair next to her, the camera catches her face, the light from the window on her left cheek, and the beauty of her hair. The pattern of coloration, however it turns out to work on a re-viewing, is there, and indicates McDonagh’s underlying thoughts have engaged with the full resonance of his chosen theme, a circumscribed passage of time.




Much else in the film, in other ways, is unspoken (or present in an unvoiced way), and much requires reflection. For example, Fr. James had been married, and his wife, the mother of Fiona (Kelly Reilly), whom he meets from the station, had died what sounds an agonizing death (but there is no more to tell us about her, other than an exchange between Fiona and her father). On Tuesday (maybe Monday) Fiona arrives by train (perhaps by prior arrangement, perhaps because of what has just happened to her), and we gradually infer – confirmed by what is said in the pub to those who do not know who Fiona – who she is in relation to him :

At the moment of his meeting her, the connection is suitably opaque, and we momentarily wonder. We wonder, in part, because of how Gleeson, in the police in The Guard (2011), chooses to spend his day off, and how he balances duty and personal life – a theme that recurs here. As to what is happening to Fr. James in this time that we are with him, the only person who knows that anything is amiss is his Bishop (David McSavage) (from what Fr. James says to him).

The Bishop counsels, but seems greatly to respect Fr. James, and does not intervene, does not require him to do certain things, even when something dramatic happens – their exchange of thoughts and views is full and frank, and Gleeson plays another character who commands respect, as his Sergeant Boyle did from FBI Agent Wendell (Don Cheadle) in The Guard. As James is, Boyle is an educated man, although they wear their knowledge differently and to different effect – Boyle does not accord with the expectations of the local force, and makes a rare link with Wendell, whereas, in Calvary there is a barrage of sophistry and posture, as if to shake James out of his faith, and he uses his intelligence as a resource (much as his character Ken, with his appreciation of art and culture, does in In Bruges (2008), not as the inconvenient piece of integrity that it can be to Boyle.

Though not exhaustively or exclusively, Fr. James takes kinds of escape from reality on both Friday, and Saturday. He well knows what he might have to do or face, but he has had a week of others who say that they do not want things that he can see that they do, and vice versa, and they have begun to take their toll on him. In this and other respects, this film has obvious echoes with Bergman’s famous The Seventh Seal (1957) (and, in this film, we even see the outcome of a gentlemanly game of chess between two men who might have reason to be at odds). As in that classic, too, time is a dimension, and the question of how one best judge what requires one’s attention.




Yet, in a sense (though this earlier film by no means precisely maps onto it), Calvary is also an inverted D.O.A. (1950) (with Edmond O’Brien (as Frank Bigelow), and re-made in a version with Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan in 1988), but with Gleeson in some sort of driving-seat, though not in full command of where the vehicle will go…




Gleeson is a whirlwind of pastoral roles in this film, and one cannot conceive anyone else bringing off the part, supported admirably by Kelly Reilly, Dylan Moran, Orla O’Rourke, Isaach de Bankolé, M. Emmet Walsh, and Chris O’Dowd, to name but a few, and with highly sympathetic contributions from Patrick Cassidy’s score and Larry Smith’s cinematography.


End-notes


* According to Deirdre Bair, who was Beckettt’s first biographer (Samuel Beckettt : A Biography, Jonathan Cape, London, 1978)), ‘The image first took on meaning for Beckettt as early as 1935, when he read St. Augustine’s Confessions, and began to use the expression to define either / or situations. It appears repeatedly in his correspondence [Bair cites the following correspondents in her note (p. 692) : George Reavey, Arland Ussher, Mary Manning Howe, and Thomas McGreevy] from that time onward […] (p. 386)’.


** Against Estragon’s twice saying ‘No’ when asked if he would like to hear, but justified to him by Vladimir on the basis that ‘It’ll pass the time’, Vladimir tells Estragon about the varying accounts of crucifixion (Waiting for Godot, Faber & Faber, London, 1965, pp. 12 – 13). Just before, when Estragon had been examining his hat and his feet, and not listening to him (p. 11), he said these words, on which he elaborates :

One of the thieves was saved. (Pause.) It’s a reasonable percentage.

There is at least one other Beckettt reference in Calvary, when the woman over whose husband Father James has earlier said the last rites, sees him again at the airport, and she fleetingly employs the closing words of his novel The Unnamable : I can’t go on I’ll go on.


*** McDonagh wrote and directed it, as he did The Guard (2011), in which Gleeson also stars.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Monday, 21 January 2013

Fuckin' Bruges

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

20 January

* Contains spoilers *

I don’t know whether In Bruges (2008) made the city even more attractive to tourists, but it was so well shot by Eigil Bryld – even the set-pieces from the typical guide-book – that it should have done.

For this was certainly not a film that did as that year’s Woody Allen’s Barcelona-titled work (as it had funding to be filmed in that city¹) and just treated us to a picture-show (however nicely), but one that embedded Bruges in the development of the film right from the opening to the closing shots (as Allen’s Paris- and Rome-centred films then did three and four years later, although it may be fanciful, just by virtue of the comparison, to suggest that Allen learnt from what Martin McDonagh’s picture does).

I did not see the film when it was released, but was aware of it at the time of Brendan Gleeson’s excellent performance in The Guard (2011), and then at the recent run of Seven Psychopaths (2012), in the light of finding which dire a friend lent me his DVD, so I know why people expected better from McDonagh writing / directing again.

In truth, though, what seemed like an under-par performance from common link Colin Farrell (as Ray) threatened to have me stop watching (either because it was too close to the use to which he was put in Psychopaths, or, perhaps, because I had thought more of him in another Allen film, Cassandra’s Dream (2007)), which makes it less implausible that Allen had seen this other Farrell film. I am glad that I did not quit, because, around the time that Ken (Gleeson) goes to see Yuri to get a gun, the film picked up for me.

Until then, possibly because I like the place, I had been rather irritated by Ray’s opening condemnation of Bruges as a shit-hole, his refusal to join in with Ken’s spirit of making the best of being sent there, including a smart-arsed comparison with Dublin, and even by his baiting some overweight Americans into chasing him : most of those things came back to haunt, as does the accidental killing that has led Ken to bring Ray to Bruges, and make the ending powerfully effective. Yes, the final theme does owe something to the t.v. series Life on Mars (2006 – 2007), and maybe even to the feeling of The Truman Show (1998), but I did not see it coming.

Early on, there had been palpable references to the exchanges between Gogo and Didi from Beckettt’s Waiting for Godot, to the situation in Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter** (and, for good measure, to Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, as Ken is flustered and cannot remember which of the two aliases used is his), and I wrongly wondered how original the writing was going to be, before realizing that they were probably passing mentions (almost inevitable in a work with buddies).

Equally fleeting appeared the echoes of Dante in the theological chat, both in front of the Hieronymous Bosch painting The Last Judgement², of which we are shown details from the centre panel, at the art gallery, and on the bench afterwards. (Giving a message to Death, anatomy lessons involving human dissection, and gruesome, if miraculous, saints’ lives had all preceded the Bosch scenes, and pricked Ray’s sensibility (and conscience ?).)

Stepping back a bit, the film opens with these words, narrated over night-time shots by an unseen Ray :

After I killed him, I dropped the gun in the Thames, washed the residue off my hands in the bathroom of a Burger King, and walked home to await instructions. Shortly thereafter, the instructions came through: Get the fuck out of London, you’s dumb fucks – get to Bruges ! [quotation truncated]


However, we may not have fully caught these words, and, because of hearing the voice saying that he did not know where Bruges was (and so momentarily feeling superior ?), may not later spot a mismatch. This occurs when a boy with adults, whom Ray sees walking across a square, gives rise to a flashback, at the end of which Ray is dragged (seemingly by Ken) from the scene where a priest and a boy lie dead (re-enter Pinter ?).

At the end, as Ray is being put on a stretcher, and, from Ray’s point of view, we see an oxygen-mask being lowered (shades of John Simm as Sam Tyler, and Beckettt’s doubt-filled trilogy ?), we hear him narrate again, as the stretcher slides inside an ambulance :

[…] And I thought, if I survive all this, I’ll go to that house, apologize to the mother there, and accept whatever punishment she chose for me. Prison, death – it didn’t matter. Cos, at least in prison, and at least in death, you know, I wouldn’t be in fuckin’ Bruges. But then, like a flash, it came to me, and I realized. Fuck, man - maybe that’s what Hell is : the entire rest of eternity spent in fuckin’ Bruges ! And I really really hoped I wouldn’t die. I really really hoped I wouldn’t die…


We have followed Ken and Ray thus far, latterly with their boss Harry Waters (another stunning role for Ralph Fiennes, that champion scene-stealer), as the triangle has been brought together by principle, betrayal, disobedience and sacrifice, centring in Bruges (words that unforcedly ring through the screenplay). Harry, who had professed a boyhood wonder for the place when he speaks to Ken, stalks through it, so fixed on his quarry that he scarcely seems to see it and its Christmas magic, which we, too, then feel less with the tense - turning to pounding and grinding - music of the chase, reminiscent of that of The Matrix (1999).

Both Ken and Ray still have life in them when, by rights (though I do not have the knowledge of the Flemish anatomists shown earlier) one might have thought that they should be dead. It is Ken’s bid to save Ray (just as it was when Ken, about to kill, stopped Ray shooting himself and put him on a train) that elevates matters above one killer (Ken himself) and whether he kills or is killed by another killer (Harry), although we are not really drawn to take sides (but cannot take the extreme behaviour of the ticket-seller of the belfry as reason for what Harry does in reprisal – one for McDonagh’s later tally of psychopaths !). (Stoppardian logic with the scene atop the belfry.)

Unknown to Ray, Harry has apparently wanted him to enjoy Bruges before being executed, but, from first to last, excepting that Chloe lives there (and, even so, he has to insult the city on their date), he never gives it a chance, whereas Ken has been soaking in the sights and experiences. Are there subterranean glimpses, here, of a meaning beyond the superficial, that Ken may be a Clarence to Ray’s George Bailey (It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)) – after all, there is Ray’s attempt on his own life, from which Ken, appointed to kill him, saved him (more Stoppardian logic), and, for example, when Ken encourages Ray to look at something during their canal-boat trip, he is hunched in his coat and does not even raise his head ?

Is Ken actually real, or no more so to anyone else than, say, Charles is to John Nash (A Beautiful Mind (2001), or Harvey to Elwood (Harvey (1950), although Harvey is, in fact, visible to others), because, of course, Ray is narrating the story and we only see what he envisages ? Enough in this film, I think, to give us pause whether Ray, like Sam Tyler, may be talking to us and / or himself from a coma, because of the horrific injuries from Harry’s dum-dum bullets (we have seen what one did to the head of Jimmy (Jordan Prentice), dressed as a schoolboy). If Ken is Ray's guide, is he a sort of Virgil to Ray's Dante ?

At the end of the film, the location of the film that is being made⁴ (on which Ray met Chloe) is peopled by some Bosch-like creatures, one of whom knocks Ray to the ground with his beak, and, somehow, Marie from the hotel is there, as well as Chloe (so even a bit of a feel of The Game (1997) or maybe 8½ (1963)).

When, after Chloe and Ray kissed (during which we saw Harry, intend on business with Ken, walk straight past, and Chloe said, of herself, ‘The most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen in all of your stupid life’ as a reason for what Ray has to stay for), they took a romantic drink together. When Jimmy came over, he said about his character and that night’s shoot that ‘the psycho-dork turns out to be some loveable schoolboy and it’s all some Boschian nightmare’.

Stephen, in Joyce’s Ulysses, says the much-quoted words History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. In this film (with Ray’s past of an accidental shot that killed a praying boy, whose prayers, clutched in his hand, Ray reads), Ray says of history, as a retort to Ken’s interest in it – just before, at the hotel, Ken was reading The Death of Capone – I used to hate history, didn’t you ? It’s all just a load of stuff that’s already happened !, and immediately rushes off, because there are ‘midgets being filmed’.

At that moment, Ray isn’t trying to awake from history, but avoid it, by chatting up (the willing) Chloe, and hearing about the dream-sequence that is being filmed, which, she tells him, is neither a pastiche of, nor an homage to, Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), but an overhead : the belfry and all the buildings do not interest him, but Chloe and Jimmy and the film do, and he is drawn to them.

He almost so wants to be part of the film-world that it is no surprise that he ends up on location again in the finale. Chloe had talked about site security, and Ray says that he evaded it, but there is certainly no evidence of any now. Does Ray have a little feel about him of Bill Harford from Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) (taken from a short story by Schnitzler) ?

However we interpret this film, there are a couple of constants – Ray’s lively, beetling brows (into which Farrell channels much of his acting), and his decorative shirt, which would seem to be the only one that he has (despite the fact that Ken and he are both shouldering bags when they arrive in the city). There are some shots where one can get a closer view of this shirt, and realize that what decorates it, which I took for music for a long time (trying to confirm which detracted from the action and drew attention to what seemed Farrell’s apparent one-dimensionality), is something else.

It cannot really be made out, but could resemble wild-card characters from an ASCII set together with a paper-trace-type pattern (when programs and data were fed in on paper-tape), or, put another way, the ones accessed from a font such as Symbol. Is that it ? Is Ray’s shirt a symbol – is it, as with the letters and numbers that, if one can see them, make up the world of The Matrix, an indication that he is – whether because he is really in a coma or in Hell (or Purgatory) – a piece of source-code amongst all this imagined reality, where Marie, Eirik, and Chloe are all somehow there to see his wounded body carried away ?


Post-script

Whatever Ray may say about Bruges, acting as a dismissive gobshite, when Ken alludes to what has brought him there, he is figuratively on his knees, as he is in front of the vivid depictions in The Groeninge Museum. Although, as dinner with Chloe shows, he is capable of violence in defence of that image, it does not seem to be his inner nature, which is to be fascinated by Jimmy (because he is 'a midget' - a childish state of wonder), to talk blarney to Chloe, to be reduced to the fear and trembling of a schoolboy facing his doom.

As Ray lies wounded, probably likely to die, and is thinking, these parts of him combine in deriving an eschatology where being in Hell equates to being in Bruges : the part of him that hopes, though founded on this extreme aversion, does not want to die and end up there eternally, but, with his wounds, living will necessarily be at the cost of being there for quite a while. If, that is, the whole foregoing has not been confused by his near-death state and he has confused and deluded himself...


There is a little more information and comment here...



End-notes

¹ For a screenplay apparently originally set in LA.

² The play is a big clue as to what instructions can eventually be expected. (The likeness to Father Ted, where Ken is an amalgam of Ted and Dougal, and Ray a more benign Jack, is less helpful.)

³ The work is a triptych, with the other two panels painted on the inside of doors that are hinged to meet in the middle, which, I gather, was a common method at the time for keeping the main painting concealed and protected when not required for devotional purposes.

Unusually for films, the work is where it is said to be, the Groeninge Museum in Bruges, although the opening sequence had, which is why I have checked, made me wonder whether all the gargoyles, statues, moons and the like had been shot on location (as well as whether the topography is fairly represented in the depiction of the scenes).


⁴ Psychopaths tries to repeat this, and other elements of Bruges (e.g. the Harry Waters character is mirrored by Charlie Brooker), with a film within a film, but it just doesn’t work.


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