in bruges, with a digression into colin farrell and his alexander

I'm so excited to see this one I could just spit. This being the hinterlands of Oregon (it's a big treat here when we cast a vote in a national election and some fellow is not already giving his acceptance speech by the time the polls close), God only knows when it'll get here. It opened at Sundance some weeks ago and audiences are divided. Some are raving, some are put off by the extreme entanglements of violence and humour... which is saying something in this post-Tarantino world.

This is Martin McDonagh's first full-length feature. The Irish playwright has been unofficial wunderkind on both sides of the theatrical pond these last ten years or so, his biggest hit to date being the dark, intense, and really like nothing else Pillowman which opened in London in 2003 with dreamcast-members Jim Broadbent and David Tennant, then two years later on Broadway with Billy Crudup and Jeff Goldblum. He has an interesting history: with no particular background in theatre, he wrote almost his entire canon in a London bedsit living on the dole. His sights turned to cinema with a short film called "Six Shooter" which he wrote and directed and because of which a little gold statue named Oscar now sits on his mantel. Netflix has got it on a DVD called, appropriately enough, the 2005 Academy Awards Short Films Collection, and it's a fine little piece of violence, mayhem, and the blackest of humours.

In Bruges promises more of the same. Well, it would be weird if it didn't. I don't think McDonagh's ever written anything that wasn't some muddle and twist of sadism, cruelty, horror and belly-laughs. And violence onstage is far more problematic than onscreen; it's right there, in the same room with you. I once saw a tiny community theatre play in which a father got drunk and raped his daughter onstage. OK... there's no way to watch that. Unless it's staged in a highly metaphorical way, the audience turns off, turns away, shuts it out; you've lost them. McDonagh manages to keep us with him in three ways: first off, much of the sadism is spoken, psychological rather than physical; it's mostly in the build-up. Secondly, nigh on nobody in McDonagh's world is a truly innocent victim; everybody has a skeleton in the old closet, everybody knows what's what. And finally, most importantly, he has spot-on timing with the comedy. He's better at this than Tarantino, who is hit-and-miss (I know a lot of people did, but I couldn't make the transition in Kill Bill, Vol. 1, jumping from the devastation of Uma rising from her coma and realizing she's lost her baby straight to the jackass horror jokes about vaseline from her brutalizing attendants). Tarantino tends too often toward the hamfisted, whereas McDonagh can follow a horrible brutality with a witticism so dry and strange and unexpected that he wins us back with his moxie and weird-ass charm.

Anyway, I'm half-crazed and salivating to see it. I'm a big Brendan Gleeson fan, and I would be a big Colin Farrell fan if he didn't make such crap films. He had me in the palm of his hand after the New World. I went back and watched everything of his I could get my hands on, and what I could get my hands on was a load of "he's-great-but-the-film-is-shite" shite. Joel Schumacher?! What the hell? That guy takes a gripping story like Veronica Guerin's, gets Cate Blanchett in the lead, surrounds her with fantastic Irish character actors and STILL manages to make a bad film. As for the rest of Farrell's resume, Alexander,for instance, I had high hopes--still do, actually, since there's a new version on Netflix that I'm praying has cured what ailed it, but those ailments were fairly elephantine. As always, not Farrell's fault--the fault for this one lies squarely on Oliver Stone's shoulders. In fact, let's have a digression on Alexander, shall we?

Every bio-film ever made has to choose one or two themes to focus on in the life of its protagonist, because you have to cut out 99.9% of even the shortest life... time strictures, you know. You tell the story in symbolic moments, chosen in relation to a few specific running conflicts. If the hero is a musician, usually a main theme is the conflict between partying and true love. If the person rises up from a minority group, it's the struggle to overcome the oppressive dominant culture. If she's a woman, it's the choice between family life and career. Big yawns all around. This is why I tend to avoid biopics. Even when they get good reviews, it's not because the script's great but because someone's doing a great impersonation, and I can go to a party for that.

Now, you go back as far as Alexander, you've got a different skein of confusion to unravel in order to find your few dominant themes. Here's one of the most famous men we've never seen a photo of, he lived a glamorous and violent life, died young and left a big legacy, his name on lots of towns in lots of countries. But, time and recorded history being the crapshoot they are, there are big holes in what we know. These holes get filled in with whatever's lingering around in the director/writer's psyche, and whatever bits of story that attracted him to the subject in the first place. Apparently what attracted Oliver Stone were Oedipal conflicts and homosexuality. The latter is approached from an isn't-it-naughty perspective, as if Stone had just discovered gayness and thinks it fascinating but keeps expecting to get his hand slapped by some nun with a ruler; the former is approached with blunderbuss volume eleven cartoonishness.

There are so many great things in this movie that it's a damnable shame he didn't find any recourse to subtlety in its interpersonal dynamics. (You want to see two of the sexiest humans in the world in an entirely unsexy love scene? Alexander and Roxanne on their wedding night.) It's got at least one of the best battle-scenes I've ever witnessed, his depiction of Gaugamela. It's so perfect: you get a real-time feeling for how long it takes to bring a phalanx around an enemy flank unseen, the difficulties of keeping in touch with all of your officers during the chaos. Stone uses a great tactic in the eagle: while Alexander is making his pre-battle pep-speech and I'm preparing to run into the kitchen because, let's face it, haven't we heard enough fiery once-more-into-the-breaches for one lifetime? suddenly the camera latches hold of an eagle and follows it up, out of range of the speech, flying across both armies to let us see the opening formation of the battle to come. Fantastic stuff. He obviously cares about the battles, and so do I, and so did Alexander, and if he'd focused more on that and less on the histrionics of the parental units and how roguish and wicked it is to be gay... ah, well. This is what I'm hoping for in this new and improved cut.

I mean, you gotta figure old Alex spent a good portion of his time figuring out strategy, having conquered the world and all. Consider Lawrence of Arabia. Lawrence himself would've told you the warfare was his passion, and ultimately more important to him than the emotional contents of that psychodynamic well of neuroses and love affairs from which we tend to draw the contents of our biopics. David Lean trusted that and came up with a great film. The psychodynamics are there, but conveyed in undercurrents and the unspoken. You come away with a strong sense of what went on inside this enigmatic man without having been cudgeled across the noggin with it. Stone, on the other hand, takes an even more heroic subject and spends his two hours plus change cutting the fellow down to a size we can recognize instead of exploring what it was that made him great. AND we come away with an aching noggin.

All that said, and despite Hart's War, despite Home at the End of the World and SWAT, this boy Farrell's got gold in him and every now and then he's got to strike the vein, just according to the laws of probability. I'm confident that In Bruges is the one... the motherlode. I'll keep you posted.