THE BACHELOR WEEKEND C
(aka: The Stag)
Ireland (94 mi) 2013 d: John
Butler
This little
single-celled organism is getting married to my sister.
—The Machine (Peter McDonald)
Ireland doesn’t produce a lot of movies for export, which is
surprising in a nation that reveres writers, often elevating them to the status
of rock stars, yet still, despite the presence of the Irish Film Board, which
provides funds for the development and production of Irish films, very few ever
see the light of day internationally.
Perhaps best known are the works of John Michael McDonagh, writer and director
of The Guard
(2011), and his brother Martin, an Irish playwright who wrote and directed In Bruges
(2008) and Seven
Psychopaths (2012), each featuring Brendan Gleeson and/or Colin
Farrell. John Butler is an aspiring Irish
writer, having moved to Los Angeles in 2006 and written a novel, The Tenderloin, also co-writing a currently
running Irish television comedy show, Your
Bad Self (2010 – present) before writing and directing this film, which
will likely win him few accolades. At
times dreadful, at other times ridiculously absurd, this film is built around a
wedding about to happen between Fionnan (Hugh O’Connor) and Ruth (Amy
Huberman), where the groom, a theater set designer, is getting too involved in
the tiny details of planning the wedding, even designing a small-scale model of
what he has in mind, which causes the wedding planner some grief, as it’s hard
to match or reproduce right down to the last detail. Ruth finds his obsessive need for managing
the minutia counterproductive and enlists his best man, Davin (Andrew Scott),
to arrange a stag party where they can hike the great outdoors of the Irish
countryside, turning into a camping trip over a weekend just to get him out of
the house. While it’s clear none of his
friends are really the outdoors type, as they’re more of a highbrow group that
feels perfectly comfortable dwelling on the details of middle class materialism,
they nonetheless convince Fionnan to let himself go out on one final fling with
the boys before losing his bachelorhood status.
While the title of the film upon release was THE STAG, once the movie
arrived in America it was quickly changed to a more generic title, typical of
Ellis Island immigration practices where foreign sounding names were
Americanized. Who knows what was so
confusing about the original title?
Opening with two friends, Fionnan and Davin, playing a cozy little
game of backgammon, Davin goes through a litany of excuses for why he can’t
commit to various girlfriends, using every known physical flaw as an excuse for
why this would never work out, never realizing the degree of pretentious arrogance
on display for even considering such a process of elimination. Little did we know human shortsightedness
would become an overall theme for the film, as a tightly knit group of friends,
all with the same general styles and tastes, where casting routine judgmental
opinions about others is standard and comes effortlessly, so it shouldn’t come
as any big surprise that the joke is eventually on them. It doesn’t bode well for the future of the
marriage when Ruth insists that the group allow her brother to tag along, a
loud and unlikable jackass known only as The Machine (Peter McDonald), someone
that drives Fionnan up the wall. Despite
their best efforts to ditch him, Ruth gives him directions to where they’re
meeting, so when he shows up and joins the ranks with the hearty expression, “Konnichiwa,
fucksticks!” they all tremble at the thought of spending the weekend with the
likes of him. Nonetheless, using a broad
range of crudeness and lewd jokes, with plenty of rude profanity, The Machine
gets in the face of each and every one of them, creating a series of
confrontations and awkward moments in the great outdoors. When it turns out the guy is a psychopath
with little concern for the regard for others, all they do is cower in
response, becoming an outdoor trek with a bully and five “Hobbits,” as he likes
to call them, anything to undermine their smug air of moral superiority. The problem is how easily they can all be
stereotyped, the groom, the best man, gay couple, the guy that hates U2 (considered
the epitome of being anti-Irish), and the psychopath, where over the course of
the next day or two, they all grate on each other’s nerves, rubbed raw by the
constant irritating presence of The Machine (no explanation for how he picked
up that name).
Shot in Dublin, Wicklow, and Galway, the film has a chatty
and combative back to nature theme with a couple of blundering fools creeping
through the back country, where they’re constantly sniveling and whining about
one thing or another, where the feeling is the tide has turned against them,
led by the reckless acts of The Machine who undermines their every step with
his own callous macho braggadocio, with none of them standing up to him, so it all
grows tiresome after awhile, yet we’re stuck with them and their juvenile
nonsense through the duration of the movie.
It’s a bit of an uncomfortable mess, but someone had the foresight to
bring along some naturally grown ecstasy, taken one evening around the
campfire, when the lads eventually break out into song. It’s all pleasant enough mainstream
entertainment until Davin blurts out the startling revelation that he’s always
been in love with the girl his best friend is marrying, brilliantly expressed
in his achingly heartfelt rendition of “On Raglan Road,” Luke Kelly Raglan Road -
YouTube (4:17), a song also poignantly featured in Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges. Out of endless mediocrity comes a moment of
true inspiration, as it’s the first (and only) moment in the entire film that
might actually fall into the realm of “human,” drawing the audience into his
dilemma, where there is finally someone to care about. The moment vanishes in an instant, however, as
the boys tear off all their clothes and run blissfully naked through the woods
searching for some lost lake that they can never find, instead getting lost and
freezing their tails off under a bundle of leaves without so much as a hint of
where they are. By the time The Machine
leads them all safely back home, like a Shakespearean Midsummer Night’s Dream spell, they’ve suddenly been recalibrated
into new men, where all the petty grievances have been set aside, all the
resentments gone, and they’ve somehow been wielded into responsible adults,
where The Machine is no longer a blithering idiot spouting endless insults and profanity,
but the glue that holds them all together, actually adding a touch of
sweetness, taking a formulaic and well-worn buddy theme, throwing all manner of
humiliation and contentious discord at them, finally bringing the curtain down
with a rousing and unifying rendition of U2’s “One” U2 - One - YouTube (5:21)
at the wedding ceremony.
