What Martin McDonagh's All About

Rating: 8/10 (5 April 2008)

The three main characters in this film speak in torrents of obscenities, well known words for sexual intercourse and contempt and female genitalia and contempt. In real life, I think badly of people who talk this way and try to stay away from them. In the movie that Martin McDonagh wrote and directed, however, the repetitious obscenities take on an almost magical quality as they reveal layers within the characters who speak them. The effect is like that in some of Michael McClure's poems in which common words are continually repeated. The result is not to build metaphors or similes but to develop weight by simple presence.
At first, the beautiful old Belgian city of Bruges seems an entirely wrong place for the two Irish gangsters who are sent to it after one of them botches the killing of a priest by shooting and killing a child as well. Ken and Ray, both hired killers, are sent by Harry, their gangster boss. Harry has pleasant childhood memories of Burges and his subordinates speculate that he thinks it's a good place for them to cool out. Ken, an experienced assassin, likes Bruges and is ready to be a serious European tourist. Ray, young and petulant, can't say "Bruges" without a preliminary obscenity and says he hates being there.
As the men tour the city's well-preserved medieval structures, they visit the Groeninge Museum and view two paintings that capture even Ray's attention. One is Hieronymus Bosch's Last Judgment with its many images of torment. The lower portion of the middle panel of the triptych is what is shown in the film, representing Judgment Day. It is full of nude human figures, many of them pierced by swords and arrows. A large knife emerges from a plant held by an ape in the panel's lower right-hand corner. The other, more realistic, painting is of the Judgment of Cambyses by Gerard David. It is a portion of an 15th century Netherlandish diptych that depicts Sisammes, an ancient Greek judge mentioned by Herodotus, being flayed alive as punishment for allowing money to influence his judgments. Several men are cutting Sisammes's skin from his body. His teeth are clenched but he is not screaming. His torturers calmly go about their business and are viewed indifferently by a group of well-outfitted aristocrats.
The paintings are more than background to the film's action; they are physical representations of the turmoil within Ken's and Ray's souls, similar to the torments in Dante's Inferno. Ultimately, McDonagh is a Catholic moralist, though it is easy to miss this aspect of his work as it is so often overshadowed by his eccentric mixture of cleverness and repulsive violence.
Ken continues to visit old buildings and museums and Ray has adventures appropriate to his station in criminal life. He exchanges insults with a dwarf, arranges a liaison with a beautiful local woman drug dealer, and blinds a Russian in one eye with a blank bullet. Then Ken gets a call from Harry ordering him to kill Ray. It seems that Harry doesn't approve of Ray's having murdered a kid. Ken doesn't like it but he's a company man who follows his boss's orders. When he approaches Ray from the back with a drawn gun, he sees that Ray's about to shoot himself. Ken can't help himself from stopping Ray. He calls Harry. Harry cusses him out and takes a train to Burges. Thus begins a bloodbath that's probably the least interesting part of the film. Except for Ray, all of the major characters and some secondary ones end up dead, as in Hamlet on steroids.
The extreme violence of McDonagh's film has consequences, like the violence in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead and unlike the violence in The Departed. Still, the unreality of much of it and the total absence of any law enforcement response take suspension of disbelief further than many viewers may be willing to go. And the film has a stagy quality, both in the way in which characters appear at just the right moment for a bloody denouement and in McDonagh's inability to abandon the proscenium arch. Fundamentally though, I don't always like McDonagh's work but I can't deny its power.