0

Warrior

Posted on January 3, 2012 by Paul

warrior-01

Warrior is a great sports movie. One of the best, and there have been a few. What it has above all else is a keen sense of family. While Rocky charted the rise, fall, montage and rise of its singular hero, Warrior tries instead to understand two strangers who were once as brothers should be.

To consider them, any relation would seem an unlikely prospect. Tommy (Tom Hardy) is a broad-shouldered boxer, contemptuous of an alcoholic father. Brendan (Joel Edgerton), a high school physics teacher. With a gym bag slung low around his waist, Tommy returns home with a whiskey peace offering, knowing all too well it will be refused. “I think I liked you better when you were drunk”, he snarls, before slumping into a chair and helping himself. Across town, his estranged family celebrates a young daughter’s birthday, having safely hidden a foreclosure letter beneath a dozen more. Theirs is a familiar horror of medical bills and refinancing, in a world apart from the middle class dream of bootstrap success. Brendan is the proud family man who lies to his wife about where he goes at night. She waits up, only he doesn’t have much of an explanation for why a bouncer would be coming home every night with bloodied fists and thick bundles of cash.

For their own reasons, the two brothers are drawn to a prestigious winner-takes-all tournament in Las Vegas. They meet one night on the beach, finding scant reconciliation amongst bitterness and regret. They circle one another in the sand, replaying the memory of Tommy and his mother haved fleed the family home, only for Brendan to stay behind with the sweetheart he would later marry. For his crimes, he faces the cold reminder of his mother having died without her first born. Even in shared grief, Tommy gives forth a rage so consuming you’d believe its tremors could roll back the tides.

I’m led to believe the sport of mixed martial-arts has a record no worse than any other, and yet to watch it is to observe a Darwinian brawl of unsparing brutality. The siblings are not obviously matched. Towering thumpers loom over the unassuming teacher from Pittsburgh, while Tommy pummels challenger after challenge until they sprawl helplessly to the canvass. A seething ball, he comes and goes without word or ceremony, not once waiting for the bell to ring. When you’re the only one left standing, to do otherwise would seem redundant.

Could a tournament such as this conclude with anything but a fight between sworn enemies? Perhaps not. Far more important than the framework are the themes you use to fill it, and writer-director Gavin O’Connor favours the bravest of all: heart. Rocky had it too, which is why we cared about the lumbering Italian in the first place. It’s why in ten years we’ll be talking about Warrior rather than Play It To The Bone, except as an exercise in sporting conflict captured with neither passion nor soul.

What counts isn’t whether two brothers make it to the final, but whether we care about them doing so. That’s what sports movies are about, and what Warrior succeeds at above all else. It’s an overwrought genre picture; a veritable chick flick for the guys. There are no points won for subtlety. Instead we have the novelty of two equally compelling fighters. Rocky fought everyone, but he fought them alone. No one cared about his two-tone punching bags, but the Conlon brothers we get. Both give us reasons to care, and still they have us choose.

It is the rare film, so transparent in its structure, that still has us doubt the outcome. Warrior has that quality and many others, among them a rare understanding of perseverance and redemption. When the end comes, as surely it must, it does so with a sound that just might break your heart.

0

The Guard

Posted on December 31, 2011 by Paul

the-guard-01

Sometimes it’s easier just to let them crash and burn than it is to chase after them.

Here’s a policeman born into Hot Fuzz with the will of In Bruges. Corpse fondling, drugs peddling, join-the-dots puzzles: these are the MOs of Sergeant Gerry Boyle, and is it any wonder? His words come courtesy of a script by John Michael McDonagh, whose brother once wrote his own debauched tale of drunken hitmen in picturesque Belgium. The Guard is a sequel in all but name and setting, rarely less than its absolute equal. These brothers know their black comedy.

Brendan Gleeson re-emerges as Boyle, whose pleasures are a little more amoral than those favoured by his previous incarnation. An Irish Garda, he takes a somewhat irreverent attitude to the business of police work, with the air of a man who has seen it all and lived to tell several tall tales. Accordingly, he isn’t one to blink in the face of crime or its misbegotten proponents. Gerry interviews a murder suspect, a young lad with a rap sheet for bestiality. “I thought that was all forgotten?” the kid whines, before figuring what the hell. “The same thing happened to Polanski, right?”.

Boyle is accompanied by his dying mother, in the case of the drug mule and the missing policeman. A black FBI agent is quickly called in, whom Boyle treats with a certain mischievous racism. Few others would get away with it, but Gleeson has a knack for bringing out the pardonable in his characters. Agent Wendall Everett takes the work seriously, and would be forgiven a double take upon hearing how cold-blooded murder and a $500,000 drug haul was deemed sufficient cause to take a day’s leave. Oh to see his reaction upon hearing of the two naughty debutantes his addled partner chose to spend it with.

In the absence of expensive sound stages, a clever script can be enough. Even discounting its inwardly-referential finale, The Guard revels in a self-aware deconstruction of its genre. In one scene, the ringleader hands some crooked cops a bag full of money, only to be accused of skimming from the top. A look of sheer incredulity begins to take form, an emotion to which Mark Strong is unusually well-suited. Then, the explosion. “This is the payoff. Why the fuck would I cheat you out of your money? That would defeat the entire purpose of the fucking interaction.”

The Guard shares with its sibling the good sense to be endlessly quotable, often for no reason, which is perhaps the best reason of all. Having watched the film, you may find yourself on the lookout for the appropriate occasion at which to declare “Like a donkey fucking a hippopotamus: it’s party time”. There’s a swaggering silliness to it all that you can’t help but get caught up with. The characters are large, the situations ridiculous. As a crime drama, it involves us to the extent we’re anxious to see Boyle succeed. He’s far too loveable to be a true antihero, and you root for his pyjama liaisons just as readily as you do his stalking the bad guys, pistol by his side. Don Cheedle would seem insubstantial by comparison, except that all straight men invariably do. That’s their purpose in a way, and one which Cheedle fully engages with in his bamboozled reactions to small-town Gaelic customs.

Moreover, how refreshing is it to have these cops and robbers, neither of whom can shoot straight? Fookin’ splendid, to be sure.

0

Perfect Sense

Posted on December 28, 2011 by Paul

perfect-sense-01

What a strange hypothetical it is to wonder which of your senses you could most easily part with. Certainly, no one who ever lost one would think to ask such a thing. Perfect Sense is sci-fi of just that apocolyptic kind, envisioning what might remain of our humanity when we are stripped, piecemeal, of all that makes us human.

In many such films, there goes a rarely unspoken assumption that were we to fail, all would be lost. Any delay in an about-turn of corporate excess would surely herald some ruinous brand of climate change, with its crashing waves and end-of-world prophecies. We’re led to believe that if Bruce Willis and Steven Tyler were unable to blast that damn asteroid from its orbit, life would simply have ceased to be. Disaster movies exist in a black and white world, for it serves their purposes well.

Despite its depicting a worldwide epidemic, Perfect Sense confines itself almost entirely to a single street in Glasgow, onto which Michael (Ewan McGregor), a chef, steps for his cigarette breaks. Susan (Eva Green) lives in the flat above. She works as an epidemiologist, whom other films might have put to use in a race to find a cure. Not here. What we have instead is human resilience in the face of inevitability. If Contagion was a story of how disaster was averted at the last, then Perfect Sense is what happened when it was not.

The disease has no name, either because no one is investigating it, or they’ve already done so and saw little point in continuing. What matters is that it affects everyone, everywhere, and slowly robs them of their senses. First comes smell, whose absence we reason has its upsides. Restaurants ably make up the difference by over seasoning their food. Then comes taste itself, for which there is no such relief. A food critic takes to describing his plates in terms of temperature and texture, which is rather akin to a movie critic being reduced to explaining the workings of the projector booth.

As go the senses, so too the mind. Routines are interrupted by slovenly carnal desires, in which formally civilised co-workers tear into flesh and vats of oil with equal abandon. Sometimes, they appear as if enveloped by a black cloud, their tears seemingly abundant and without end. When they necessarily revert to their former selves, there is a collective moment of realisation. Strangers gaze at one another, at their stained clothes and sodden faces, suddenly appalled at what has become.

Michael and Susan huddle together, their romance trapped amidst a fracturing sea. They continue to meet, even as debris litters the street and quarantine orders go up. Their relationship is frequently seen to bow and bend, as if breaking, only to blossom once more. They are not billed names, isolated from the prevailing winds – their fate is that of everyone else. There are no approaching tidal waves, or imminent invasions; no cataclysmic event to make or ruin. The future of Perfect Sense is one in which we simply continue, ever-more disabled, redefining humanity as we must.

Pages ... 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16