RSS

Contact us

Thursday 20 November 2008

Blame Quentin

In Bruges
18, Nationwide

Ray is jumpy and twitchy. Back home, Ray botched his first assignment — the assassination of a priest — by also accidentally killing a young boy. We see this in flashback along with the bullet hole blasted though the child’s forehead. (Cheers, Quentin; thanks a lot). However, although Ray is meant to be jumpy and twitchy, Farrell plays jumpy and twitchy very jumpily and twitchily indeed, with his thick, Groucho Marx eyebrows bouncing all over the place. ‘Whoa, Colin,’ I wanted to say, ‘rein it in a little.’ Gleeson is the one to watch here. Gleeson’s performance may even be a masterclass in reining it in; just a gaze and it’s all there: his wounded dignity, his resigned self-disgust and his fascination with the possibility of redemption, at least for Ray, who is young enough to start over. They stay in a hotel run by a pregnant woman, who may be the only decent person in the whole film, and the only person they are properly decent to. Pregnancy: new life, new beginnings. Respect.

Anyway, as they await instructions from Harry everything Ken and Ray encounter in Bruges is put up as fair comedic game. These range from targets you seriously can’t miss, like waddling fat American tourists, through to touchier subjects like child abuse, gays (‘stop crying, you big gay baby’) and the American dwarf in town to shoot a Eurotrash pastiche of Don’t Look Now (‘...or is it an hommage?’). When this works well it works very well — personally, I love a midget joke almost as much as I love heritage movies — but sometimes it is just noxious. When a coked-up dwarf starts ranting about race, I don’t know about you, but I tend to turn off. The film climaxes when Harry (Ralph Fiennes, possibly after a spell at The Vinnie Jones School of Unfeeling Bastards) rides into town for the final shoot-out. This isn’t pretty.

Although there is nothing particularly new about this film or its concerns — sin and redemption — the dialogue between Ray and Ken is, often, not just spot-on, but also wonderfully melodic. (Alas, it’s impossible to quote, as it relies so much on rhythm and repetition.) It is also, somehow, so blissfully constructed that you get Ray and Ken without the need for any clumsy back stories at all. It’s just all the violence that did me in. Indeed, if you see Tarantino, you might even want to give him a Chinese burn but whatever you do, don’t slice off the top of his skull as if it were a soft-boiled egg. That would be so playing into his hands, too.

More articles from: Deborah Ross | this section

Print this article  |  Email to a friend  |  Permalink  |   Comment

Post this entry to:   del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Advertisement

Spectator Business | Apollo Magazine

Corporate | Advertising | Privacy | Terms

Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London, SW1H 9HP

All Articles and Content Copyright ©2008 by The Spectator | All Rights Reserved