If you liked In
Bruges, (2008) which was written and directed by
Martin McDonagh and starred Brendan Gleeson, the chances are pretty
good you will also like The Guard, which was written and
directed by John Michael McDonagh and stars Brendan Gleeson. John
Michael is the brother of Martin both by blood and by style. Both
write a demotic and vulgar version of the sort of Irish crosstalk
act which, at least to judge by the parody of it in P.G.
Wodehouse’s The Mating Season, used to be a staple of the
Music Hall stage in its British heyday — doubtless to the distress
of many sensitive, intelligent, and non-violent Irishmen who were
not fortunate enough to live in an age like ours where offensive
stereotypes are banned or ostracized to the cultural fringes.
Well, it begins to look as if offensive stereotypes are
making something of a comeback. The sole “memorable quote” listed by the IMDB for a
movie shot through with wittily sparkling repartee is the avowal by
its hero, Mr. Gleeson’s Sgt. Gerry Boyle of the Garda, that he is
Irish and that racism is a part of his culture. It is a clever
line, you will readily apprehend, because it plays off the
“multiculturalist” anxiety that all cultures should be respected.
Naturally, the Irish version of multiculturalism would be to
express a paradoxical protection under its aegis for racism. It
will also be understood, however, that this is not real
racism, or at least not racism as it is assimilated, according to
current custom, to “hate speech.” There is nothing hateful about
Sgt. Boyle’s needling of his black American odd-couple cross-talk
partner, FBI Agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle). On the contrary,
their often politically incorrect badinage is seen as a bonding
mechanism and therefore A Good Thing, as in Gran
Torino.
But it is also A Good Thing because it is A Bad Thing. You
can tell because there are other Bad Things that our hero gets up
to — including drug-taking, drinking on the job, corruption,
surreptitious support for the IRA, and patronizing prostitutes —
which are intended to be Good Things because he does them and
because they bespeak the sort of authenticity that is as much the
mark of today’s hero as a pure heart was of the pre-modernist one.
He is also good to his mother (Fionnula Flanagan) who is dying of
cancer and who, like him, is an inveterate carouser and
hell-raiser, at least in her own estimation. No longer able to
indulge herself in much of this kind of thing, however, and unhappy
with the life that is left to her in some kind of hospice, she
prefers to arrange her own departure from it — which is also a
mark of authenticity and appears to serve as an example to her
son.
The villains are also cool because they have philosophical
arguments in the intervals between their cold-blooded murders.
This, it has to be said, isn’t very original of them, however, and
Nietzsche- or Schopenhauer-quoting bad guys are rather a movie
cliché these days, as are comical, sensitive and insecure ones like
O’Leary (David Wilmot) who, on being called a psychopath by one of
his at best slightly less psychopathic confederates angrily
replies: “A sociopath, not a psychopath. There’s a
difference. They taught me that in Mount Joy [prison].”
“What’s the difference?” asks psychopath number
two.
“I don’t know,” replies O’Leary mournfully.
Mr. Gleeson’s Gerry Boyle is what we might call,
oxymoronically, a transgressive hero — which is pretty much the
only way to be a hero these days unless you are (and, as
The Dark Knight showed, sometimes even if you are)
a superhero. Since being a hero is very much in conformity with
traditional social rules and conventions and since being
transgressive is very much not in conformity with them, the appeal
of someone like Gerry lies in his contradictions. But in those
contradictions there also lies a serious threat to dramatic
coherence that can be summed up in the following question: why does
our hero not take the bribe offered him by the chief of the
bad-guys (Liam Cunningham)? We know that he’s not above a little
corruption and that he takes drugs himself. Why shouldn’t he turn a
blind eye to these drug dealers when everything conspires to make
it easy for him to do so? Why, more importantly, does he charge
into a hail of drug-dealer bullets knowing that it is a suicidal
act? Is it because it is a suicidal act? Does he want to
be re-united with his mammy? Or is he just sick of the quest for
chemical oblivion in this bleak corner of County Galway?
There is, to be sure, a mystery at the heart of all heroic
acts, and there are those whose opinions I respect who see Gerry’s
as the act of an honorable man, perhaps bent on redeeming his
various falls from grace by avenging a murdered partner (Rory
Keenan) whom he despised in life. He is, indeed, close enough to a
real — as opposed to a transgressive hero — to make this a
possible reading of a film that is to that extent enjoyable. But I
find the clever bit of plotting by which he appears in the end to
have arranged for himself an exit strategy, if not from life then
from Galway, just a little bit too reminiscent of the Tarantinian
comic-book hero he so often resembles. The cool often aspire to
join the ranks of the honorable, but they can only ever do so, to
my eye, by the sacrifice of verisimilitude. To be transgressive is
a refusal of reverence before something greater than oneself, to be
brave an acceptance of same. The two cannot easily or satisfyingly
co-exist in one character without showing too much the signs of his
creator’s artifice.
