“IF I GREW UP ON A FARM and was retarded, Bruges might impress me.” That’s antsy and immature Irish hitman Ray’s (Colin Farrell) impression of the gloomy medieval Belgian town he and his older, wiser partner Ken (Brendan Gleeson) have been banished to for unknown reasons by their psychotic boss Harry (Ralph Fiennes). It also represents the general tone and tenor of first-time writer-director Martin McDonagh’s violent, impolite and damn funny black comedy In Bruges. Here, all sacred cows — and several characters — go straight to the slaughterhouse.
For his part, Ken digs the canal-streaked city’s perfectly preserved architecture and the long and storied history contained within its gothic buildings and echoing off its cobblestone streets. “I like it here,” he says, shortly before gazing out of a church tower and aiming a finger-pistol at people walking below. Ken may appreciate aesthetic beauty and historical memory, but he’s still a killer. Indeed, McDonagh fills his movie with such juxtapositions, reminding us there’s more to everything here than what’s visible on the surface.
Take Jimmy (Jordan Prentice), the ketamine-soaked dwarf actor whom Ray befriends. In the movie’s best scene, the unlikely pals discuss race relations while snorting blow with two whores from Amsterdam in a seedy hotel room. Jimmy’s sensitive about being a little guy, but his own second-tier status doesn’t prevent him from advocating the start of a race-war with black dwarves. When, baffled, Ray asks why he wants to take up arms against his fellow little people, Jimmy, coke surging in his brain, stands up and proclaims: “You don’t know how much shit I’ve had to take off black midgets!”
In-your-face, topsy-turvy moments such as these occur throughout, and, in a weirdly uncomfortable way, cause us to reflect on the futility of our painful politeness to others based on superficial identifiers. McDonagh shows we’ve only succeeded in bottling up racism — and every other -ism, for that matter — and saving it for release later, when our guard is down, or when we think we’re in front of a sympathetic audience.
Also piquing Ray’s interest is Chloë (Clémence Poésy), a Bruges native who masquerades as an avant garde filmmaker. Her devious side is first revealed in the aftermath of another startlingly direct and hilarious scene, in which Ray beats an American and his wife for complaining about Chloë’s smoking in a restaurant. The exchange is subversive because the Americans respond to perceived impoliteness via their own impoliteness. Ray ups the impolite ante, inciting the couple to attack him. Whose value system is more valid when the mode of expression for both is the same, McDonagh asks.
While Ray mixes it up with snooty Americans, devious women and drugged-out midgets, Ken plays by the rules and waits for Harry to ring their room. When the call finally does come, the reason Harry gives for Ken and Ray’s stay in Bruges is as ironic as it is shocking. Like so much here, it has to do with enforcing twisted, hypocritical moral codes. The layer it adds to Ray and his relationship with Ken, not to mention the film itself, is both comic and bleak in its vision of human folly.
With a lesser writer than McDonagh and lesser actors than Farrell (who continues to impress in his post-A-list acting life, first with Cassandra’s Dream and now here) and the always reliable Gleeson, In Bruges’ madcap ending could’ve rendered it yet another Tarantino knock-off with a foreign accent a la Guy Ritchie’s oeuvre. Instead, it ranks with the smarter noir-ish comedy imports, such as 2000’s Sexy Beast. (Indeed, Fiennes’s Harry rivals Ben Kingsley’s Don Logan for sheer naked and aggressive insanity.)
That McDonagh manages to mirror our own uptight place and time with an obscure European city stuck in the past is a testament to the film’s insidious intellectual underpinnings. Bullshit only In Bruges.
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