Gangster Pilgrim's Progress

Rating: 9/10 (2 September 2010)

Many critics' reviews of In Bruges have given somewhat faint praise to the film for freshening up a bit the dying genre of the glib gangster flick. But this does an incredible disservice to such an insightful and thought-provoking and big film as In Bruges. And it is a very big film, the biggest I've seen in years - a film of big ideas, and by contrast a film just as adept at meditations on the innumerable small details of real life. Its a film as big as life, and not bound by any easy comparison to any single identifiable film genre. Its even bigger than real life, delving effortlessly past the smug external demeanor of a young hoodlum and into the dreams and nightmares of his tortured soul. This is simply Colin Farrell's greatest role that I am personally aware of. Previously I thought he was just some sort of brooding poser, not to mention poofter (is that the Brit term?) - some sort of marketing-generated icon for the gays and gals, complete with scruffy fashion and face growth and cute accent. But after this role his sins are forgiven and he is redeemed, like his character is in Bruges. He immediately gets Sean Connery stature in my book. (Brendan Gleason is terrific as well.)
But as to a reexamination of the gangster ethos in general, here is something quite remarkable. The film makes us to truly understand how that world is inherently a world of authority, no different than any other government. And the men that occupy that world kill other men only because they deserve to be killed, at least in the estimation of the authorities of that world who are to be obeyed. However, things like killing children and suicide are morally unconscionable to them just like they are to most people. And the men of that world are in fact real people, that need to be redeemed and are in fact redeemable - not in some simplistic revival meeting kind of way, but via a path as complex as circuitous as the world they have voluntarily chosen to inhabit, but a path that is ultimately compelling and believable. (In the process though, some of them with the strictest moral codes do not find salvation.) This is in such marked contrast to previous films like the Godfather, in which the Catholic Church for example is just an elaborate prop and backdrop exploited by proud and callous men to bolster a false appearance of stability and respectability. (Consider Michael Corleone staring stone-faced through his infant son's christening while having all his enemies whacked.) In Bruges truly humanizes gangsters in a way that has simply never been accomplished before in any other film. Is this Romanticism or Realism. It feels like the latter.
But what is remarkable is how that emotional realism is achieved in the context of a vivid psychological and cinematic dreamscape of Bruges, a place that is nevertheless quite real, a cloistered world existing in a modern one - oh well I could pile on some more metaphors, but its late. Great flick though. Really great. A lot greater than many brain-dead critics in the external reviews above give it credit for. So many great scenes - Farrell gazing out from the train as he leaves Bruges, at a dismal marsh-strewn landscape with overcast skies, a landscape reflecting the state of his own soul; the young boy accidentally killed while waiting for the priest, still clutching his hand-printed list of sins to confess: "1) Being moody; 2)Being bad at maths; 3)Being too sad;" And yet throughout the film the unforced humor that emerges time after time in spite of all this. Its a film of vast range and ambition, its such an inexplicable disservice to compare it to a self-conscious genre flick like Pulp Fiction. (Not to say Pulp Fiction is bad.) Maybe this film is better watched alone than in a drunken crowd at Sundance, I don't know. Four out of four stars.