IN BRUGES B+
Great Britain
Belgium (107 mi) 2008
‘Scope d: Martin McDonagh
An extremely witty, at times outrageously funny crime
thriller written by the Irish playwright director McDonagh, featuring Brendon
Gleeson and Colin Farrell as the freely cursing Ken and Ray, an unlikely pair
of Irish hit men on the run holed up in Bruges, Belgium, which is a tourist
delight for Ken and a living Hell for Ray.
The two are stuck together booked in the only room available during the
Christmas holiday season where they continually grate on each other’s nerves, stuck
there until they hear from their boss. Meanwhile,
Ken is astounded by the history of what turns out to be the oldest medieval
city in Belgium, including a church that lays claim to having actual drops of
Jesus’s blood, not to mention an old world charm of narrow cobblestone streets
with plenty of dark alcoves, ancient church towers, small pubs, restaurants,
hotels, and outdoor café’s overlooking the arching bridges spanning over a
picturesque canal running through the city, sumptuously filmed by Eigil Bryld, while
Ray thinks it’s a hellhole and is itching to get out as soon as the boss arrives. The incessant harping dialogue between the
two is the essence of the film, a stymied, existential Waiting for Godot purgatory through which other characters are
introduced, offering brief rays of hope in an otherwise desolate interior
landscape, where Ray especially is morbidly miserable after a hit goes wrong,
accidentally killing a young boy. Adding
to this disconsolate mood is a visit to an art museum where grotesque Brueghel
paintings reveal a kind of apocalyptical human mayhem, as if Hell has broken
out on the face of the earth.
Something of a character driven road movie, this outcast
pair can hardly let a day go by without creating some kind of petty
disturbance, usually caused by Ray, who is at his wits end pretty much every
second of every day. His mood changes,
however, when they run across a film shoot where he sees the best sight Bruges
has offered him so far, Chloë, a gorgeous woman on the set played by Clémence
Poésy, who he impresses by sneaking past security to introduce himself. When it
turns out neither is what they seem, a sudden fascination develops, which of
course meets a temporary setback when a brooding boyfriend shows up, but
despite the gloomy nature of their professions, all is in good fun in this
movie, which for the most part is a light-hearted romp, not the least of which
includes the presence of dwarf actor Jimmy (Jordan Prentice), who’s part of the
dream sequence of the film shoot, and has a fixation for prostitutes and drugs,
in no particular order, or Eric Godon as Yuri, the Russian gun dealer (“You can
get guns anywhere.”) who finds himself characterizing his customers by their
response to his carefully chosen vocabulary, which borders on the mundane, yet
he swears by his methodology, or Thekla Reuten as Marie, the pregnant hotel
desk clerk who insists on placing a special line in a written message left by
the boss taking exception to being called the clerk, when in fact she is the
owner of the establishment. Lest one
think it’s all artifice and surface hilarity, there are also abrupt mood
shifts, beautifully complimented by the superb music of Carter Burwell, one of the
more sublime is expressed by the musical choice of Schubert’s Winterreise (Winter Journey), also
featured in Bergman’s IN THE PRESENCE OF A CLOWN (1997), as Ray wakes up after
a boisterous party one morning, where his dour mood is the picture of inconsolable
winter melancholy.
Eventually the boss, Harry, Ralph Fiennes with a hair
trigger temper and an even greater affinity for curse words, shows up in an
attempt to sort things out, where it turns into an
every-man-with-firearms-for-himself movie, expressed through a kinetic kind of Run
Lola Run (Lolo Rennt) (1998) relish, where Burwell amps up the volume and characters are
seen racing through those narrow city streets in a kind of picture postcard
tribute to the city itself, reminiscent of Nicolas Roeg’s exquisite use of
Venice in Don't
Look Now (1973). Somehow,
absurdity is the rule of the game, as its chaotic presence reveals itself
throughout, beautifully balanced, however, by the superlative performances
onscreen, by the more subdued, reigned in emotions of Ken and Ray matching wits
with the near hysterical force of Harry, by the actions of the pregnant hotel
owner who refuses to budge, standing between two would be killers urging them
both to put down their weapons, where Fiennes utters the inevitable line: “Don’t
be stupid. This is a shootout.” Despite
repulsive dwarf jokes, ridiculous race humor, and a flurry of ethnic slurs, all
representative, however, of Ray’s deteriorating mood in Bruges of a Brueghel Hell
on earth, where a literal Pandora’s Box of anything goes is cracked wide open,
where an anti-American tourist thread is among the funniest in the film, it’s
this kind of cathartic openness of no restrictions whatsoever that makes this
dialogue so sharp, so free-wheeling hilarious and scathingly incendiary at the
same time. This first time film director
has an extraordinary gift for dialogue, and in this picture he’s got equally
gifted actors who can deliver his lines with ease, making it one of the more
enjoyable movies of the year.
