In Bruges

I once ate some mussels in Brussels. Rhyme and cobblestoned old world charm aside, the experience was ruined when a cowboy-hatted Louisianan and his posse sat at the table next to us and started filling the centuries-old streets with booming new world anecdotes about the oil industry, football, and other topics of conversation used to ward off old world effeteness. I offered the waiter a look of disgust in solidarity, but he made it clear that he thought all Americans were philistines. New York or New Orleans: That was just splitting cheveux.

Who could have guessed, back in 1987, that European views of this country would actually get worse? The running joke in In Bruges is the hostility Colin Farrell’s Ray feels toward Americans. When he warns an obese man in a Yankees cap that maybe he doesn’t want to climb a tower with particularly narrow stairs, the man takes offense and chases him until he collapses, out of breath. When a dwarf actor (Peter Dinkage) apologizes for being from the States, Ray says, “That’s okay, just don’t say anything loud and crass.” Later, he attacks an obnoxious man in a restaurant who complains about the cigarette Ray's date is puffing on, delivering a final blow with “And that’s for killing John Lennon.” (He later regrets that the man turns out to be Canadian.)

You have to appreciate the anti-Americanism, but my wife noted that playwright McDonagh's first film owes much to the still-contemporary Scorcese/Tarantino trope of putting the inner lives and outward quirks of sociopaths front and center in their narratives. In McDonagh’s version, two hoods are sent to Bruges, in Belgium, to lay low after a hit has gone terribly wrong. One of the men, Brendan Gleeson, is an aesthete. He's a voracious tourist, wowed by the medieval splendor of the town. His cohort, Ray, is  a younger, rougher sort,  yet he is tormented to the point of suicide by the appalling act he has committed . This situation becomes a springboard for the pungent dialogue McDonagh has made such good use of in his plays, most notably The Pillowman. As in a good play, the story works best when it lies in the dynamic between the characters, and the back-and-forth frequently wrings a laugh from the most gruesome of circumstances. The two leads do a fine job of toggling between comedy and pathos, and Ralph Fiennes, playing a role similar to Ben Kingley's Don Logan in Sexy Beast is seamless as their crime boss.

Visually, McDonagh has stacked the deck by shooting in a location that looks like it’s out of a “fairytale,” as is remarked several times in the film. And as one might expect, the best moments come out of the writing and performances, not the direction. But who can doubt this wunderkind will only improve his cinematic technique? Not that I'm dying for that to happen. As nifty a little suspenser as this is, it's really nothing special, and in the last 15 minutes, the film falls apart in an orgy of gore and existential irony. The Pillowman, on the other hand, is a work chock full of original ideas and large themes. There must be at least several thousand film auteurs running around, putting together their little projects and gathering accolades at film festivals. If McDonagh winds up in Hollywood, maybe he'll be an object of scorn by Brussels waiters too, and rightly so.

Linkateria:

• More Bruges reviews
  
• Trailers and clips
  
• A Mind in Connemara (Fintan O’Toole, The New Yorker) - 2006 profile of playwright Martin McDonagh
  
• The Pillowman (Google Books)