In Bruges * * *
(16, general release)
HITMAN DILEMMA: Brendan Gleeson faces a difficult decision in In Bruges
In 2004, Martin McDonagh expanded his glittering career into film with the brief and bloody short, Six Shooter. Like practically everything else the award-winning playwright has touched, it turned to gold, winning him an Oscar in 2006. In Bruges is his first feature.
Interestingly, McDonagh originally intended his two principal characters to be Cockneys; he wanted to get away from the Irish rural characters that have populated his plays, and write about the city he grew up in.
When Brendan Gleeson came on board, he remarked to McDonagh that his London dialogue read surprisingly well in a Dublin accent. When Colin Farrell joined him on the cast, the writer and director must have decided that resistance was futile and his two London heavies became Dubliners on the loose. Ray (Farrell) and Ken (Gleeson) are a couple of hitmen who arrive in Bruges in the aftermath of a botched killing.
Ray, it turns out, is an apprentice bad guy, recruited by Ken. When sent to kill a priest (Ciaran Hinds), Ray shoots the cleric but also succeeds in taking the head off an adjacent praying child. In McDonagh's sentimental underworld, gangsters have a code of honour below which they will not stoop. Whacking small boys is clearly unacceptable, and so Ray and Ken have been sent to the quaint Belgian city to lay low until things cool down. Or so they think.
When their verbose and excitable boss Harry (Ralph Fiennes) contacts Ken, he tells him that Ray has crossed the line and thus forfeited the right to live. As Ken brought him into the gang, it's up to him to kill him. But Ken has grown fond of his young partner, and is faced with a horrible dilemma.
Ray, meanwhile, moans bitterly about his surroundings. Bruges, he decides, is "a shithole", its culture is boring, its nightlife staid and hokey. Then he stumbles onto a film set and is smitten with a mysterious blonde who turns out to be a drug dealer. Chloe (Clemence Poesey) and he go out on a date, and though it ends fairly disastrously (he attacks a tourist who complains about Chloe's smoking and then beats up her ex-boyfriend) the two begin to fall in love. But Harry has arrived in Bruges, and doesn't seem very happy.
An intermittently frantic black comedy that adopts from the word go a playful and digressive verbal style reminiscent of vintage Tarantino, In Bruges is full of freshness and ideas. McDonagh and his producers had the sense to find themselves a good cinematographer, and Eigil Bryld's lovingly-photographed Bruges becomes a telling counterpoint to the squalor and pointlessness of the central characters' lives.
Some of McDonagh's writing positively sparkles, especially when a disembodied Harry is explaining to Ken that Bruges would be overrun by tourists if it was "somewhere else -- you know, somewhere good". In fact, it's Fiennes who best succeeds in bringing the dialogue to life, which makes you wonder if Ken and Ray might not have worked better as Cockneys. Fiennes, in an unlikely role for him, is simply fabulous, and draws all the comedy from his character's inner turmoil without turning him into a cartoonish buffoon.
Gleeson and Farrell are also very good as the loveable gangsters, and Farrell in particular looks sharper than he has in a long time. Ken and Ray have an almost father-son dimension to their relationship, and the two actors develop this theme with commendable subtlety.
However, there's an underlying glibness to the tone of In Bruges that prevents it from being entirely believable. Some of McDonagh's set pieces seem too contrived; his cleverness tends to get in the way of his characters' credibility; and sometimes the film feels more like an intellectual exercise than a story.
But there's loads to enjoy here as well, and for a first feature it's a remarkably polished achievement. One hopes this is the first of many.
- Paul Whitington
