Like other British films set among lower-class criminals, the characters are endearingly human and writer-director Martin McDonagh’s script is bright and clever.
By Bob Brown
ONE of the running gags in Irish writer-director Martin McDonagh’s fiendishly funny film is how boring Belgium is. As the head hit man Harry (Ralph Fiennes) remarks to one of his underlings, Ken (Brendan Gleeson), it’s a good thing Bruges is in such a dump as Belgium. If it were in a nicer country, tourists would overrun the place, ruining the unspoiled charm of Europe’s best-preserved medieval city.
At least that’s the clean version of Harry’s remarks. One of the other running gags is that Harry and his thugs, Ken and Ray (Colin Farrell), swear so much, most of what they say can’t be printed in a family newspaper. Even the four-letter nouns and verbs are modified by their adjectival and adverbial equivalents.
What underpins McDonagh’s work and makes it so appealing is its attitude. It’s the world seen through the eyes of two small-time Irish crooks, Ken and Ray, who are mysteriously sent to Bruges to await orders after a job. They are holed up in a tiny hotel run by a very pregnant Denise (Anna Madeley). The humor builds on the mismatch between the more cultured Ken, who enjoys reading and sightseeing while they wait, and the culture-challenged Ray, who hates quaintness and thinks an evening is wasted unless it begins with a pub-crawl and ends with an attractive girl.
Much of the humor centers on the fidgety Ray, a type of myopic Irishman whose ideal city is his native Dublin. In a way, he’s a self-centered Irish parody of the ugly American. In fact he’s played off against gluttonous American tourists and their prejudices, which are mocked fiercely in the film, as are rural English towns, homosexuality, non-English-speaking Europe, women, dwarves, smoking, racial intolerance, Los Angeles, religion, and most of all Bruges itself.
Ray is squirming to get out of the place as soon as he sets eyes on it, especially if he has to share a room for two weeks with Ken, who is gay. When they go for a brew at the local pub, Ray invariably orders “One gay beer and one regular.” He doesn’t settle in until he spies a dwarf, Jimmy (Jordan Prentice), who is in the cast of a small film shooting in the old city. Ray obsesses about the suicidal tendencies of “midgets.” When it’s pointed out that dwarves hate being mistaken as midgets, he responds that it’s no wonder they’re suicidal. (“I’m in a dream sequence,” Jimmy says — a send-up of the common complaint by dwarf actors that they are only used as comic relief or in dream sequences). With the film crew is the ravishing Chloë (French actress Clémence Poésy), whom Ray ineptly chats up. As long as he can hook up with her, Ray is content to wait it out in Bruges, until the inevitable phone call that will assign the next job.
Like other British films set among lower-class criminals (Trainspotting and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels come to mind), the characters are endearingly human. Deeds aside, they all operate under strict professional ethics, honoring work that is well and correctly done, and accepting the penalty for work that is not. One of McDonagh’s strengths as a writer is that he grounds his film in such clearly drawn characters, the logic of action flows naturally from them.
This is Ray’s first hit, and it’s obvious from his remorse after a bungled business that he’s in the wrong profession. He has troubling flashbacks. Despite his general obtuseness, Ray has a soft heart. That’s why Chloë sticks with him, even after he leaves patrons on the floor in a restaurant punch-out over second-hand smoke. Trouble seems to follow him, all the way to the puzzling choice of Bruges.
As the point of the assignment comes into focus, the film turns into a chase thriller involving a back-alley Flemish gun dealer who is fixated on Bruges’ many “alcooves,” a subcontracted thug who can’t handle a gun, and the arrival of Harry, a man of hair-trigger temper who leaves his long-suffering family behind in England to finish an unfinished job.
Gleeson and Fiennes are, of course, outstanding, but the real breakthrough performance is by Farrell, who’s known for roles in action films like Minority Report and Phone Booth. Who’d have thought of him as a comic? But he’s actually very good at it and the character Ray also slips over into drama as well. The characterizations and the script by McDonagh are bright and clever, and the film is a taut piece of work.
As for the setting, contrary to one character’s implication that there’s never been a film made in Bruges, there have actually been quite a few. No surprise, since Bruges really is the picturesque fairy tale town that Harry remembers from his childhood and that Ken has come to appreciate on assignment — even if Ray thinks the place better fits the painter Hieronymus Bosch’s Hell. After this movie, Belgium may well experience an influx of tourists coming to see if Bruges’ movie-set charm, as photographed by Eigil Bryld, is for real. At any rate, the film itself is.
Rated R for strong bloody violence, pervasive language and some drug use.