A Very Action Movie Christmas: In Bruges (Dir. Martin McDonagh, 1h 47m, 2009)

 

The Christmas Action Movie essentially comes in two varieties. In column "A", you have your Gremlins, your Die Hards 1 and 2, your Reindeer Games and Lethal Weapons, where the action is intrinsically linked with Christmas or where it being at Christmas plays a major part in the story. And then there are those films for which Christmas is essentially set-dressing; you might see Christmas trees and other festive decor, the occasional carol, and so on, but them being set at Christmas is merely incidental. This second category are a weird bunch, from George Lazenby's sole outing in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, to Rocky IV to the subject of today's review, Irish playwright Martin McDonaugh (perhaps best known for 2018's dark masterpiece, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri)'s directorial debut, In Bruges. Starring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeeson, it depicts the brutally violent, blackly funny journey of two hit-men fleeing post-a bungled hit to Bruges in Belgium, in a quasi-spiritual search for redemption, closure and a meaning to the life and death they inflict upon their targets, among the ancient buildings and Christmas markets of the city.

We begin with Bruges in darkness. Colin Farrell's narration over the streetlight lit vistas. He (Ray) and his mentor, Ken, have been sent to Bruges to lie low, their arrival in Bruges, and in particular the square that eventually forms the stage for the denouement of the film a perfectly written piece of character work, as the young, impulsive, but ultimately penitent Ray, and the world weary, practical and curiously spiritual Ken respectively dismiss and laud the city they have arrived in. The duo sightsee, and here, in deft strokes, McDonagh sets out their world-views. Ken, finding the city's Medieval nature charming, ascends Bruges' towering Belfry, following one of the film's many curiously idiosyncratic thumbnail sketches, of a punctilious ticket clerk who Ken, a few cents short, tries to reason with, to no avail, and gazes out on the landscape.

Below, we have a perfect encapsulation of the distinction between earthly-focused Ray, who spends much of the opening scenes of the film trailing after Ken around the churches and canals of Bruges, and the higher minded Ken. Ray promptly picks a fight with American tourists (another excellent little thumbnail sketch of a trio of almost comicly obese tourists) who, somewhat optimistically want to climb the tower, descending into a foul-mouthed tirade with the zinger coming with Ken's return, who, more diplomatically attempts to warn them off the trip. This, like the tower itself, returns in the finale, shut by one of the Americans having a medical episode in their fruitless attempts to reach the top.

The distinction between Ray and Ken, though, is clear; it is this that gives the film much of its energy-the tension between mentor and pupil palpable in several sequences, Ray staring off into space as the elder man extols the virtue of medieval architecture or embraces the beauty of the tiny Basilica of the Holy Blood and explains to the bored Ray its religious importance, and its history. Indeed, the film is rife with religious imagery, particularly in its centrepiece scene in which the The Last Judgment by Hieronymus Bosch, a haunting disturbed image in an otherwise clinically white museum triggers discussion about death and the afterlife between the two hit-men. One, certainly cannot help but compare their predicament, their essential entrapment in Bruges, to not only Beckett's Waiting for Godot, a play that not only taps to the centre of the Irish condition but also deals with morality and religion, but the very idea of purgatory, something that Ray himself returns to several times in his inner monologues.

And it is here that, above everything, the film adopts the feel of a medieval morality play; indeed, for all the film's violence in its second half, much as Reservoir Dogs is the Jacobean farce dropped into 1990s America, so In Bruges feels like the earlier plays of McDonagh, at once intimate and brutal, entwined with this ancient form of theatre. The parallels are clear; much as in the morality play, Ray is the everyman, fallible and fragile, clearly the surrogate for the audience, and here, McDonaugh, consciously or otherwise, draws upon perhaps the best known surviving of the plays, Everyman. Ken, the spiritually minded mentor, is a natural extension of the most famous archetype of the medium, Justice and Equity, the theologically inclined figure who finds grace both in protecting and eventually sacrificing himself to protect his charge and friend. Perhaps the key part of the film, though, is Ray finding the ability to live with himself after his actions, a penitence, in the medieval fashion, that, and an eventual escape from Ralph Fiennes' Harry, a vengeful Death.

For it is violence that stalks Ray and Ken throughout their otherwise mundane and occasionally boozy historical tour through Bruges. It first erupts when, on a date together with local drugdealer-cum-fixer-cum-thief Chloë (an absolutely sublime performance from Clémence Poésy, who plays an excellent foil to Ray), he assaults two Canadian tourists in a brutal beating that leaves both unconscious on the floor. This, like every explosion of violence in In Bruges comes back to haunt Ray in the film's final act, the Canadians foiling his escape to pastures unknown. Barely has Ray left this but an encounter with Eirik (an enjoyably snivelling Jeremie Renier, who becomes the target of several of the film's supporting characters. Violence begets violence.

And then the film erupts in its centrepiece, the centre of this film's altarpiece of violence and redemption and the soul of man, with the brutal murder of a priest (a minor, but pitch-perfect performance by Irish acting stalwart Cillian Murphy), whose gangland execution leads to the accident murder of a young child, the film's one truly brutal image of the gaping bullet-hole, the Christian imagery of the felled, angelic child. It is something that haunts Ray, it forms the reason for the trip, as in a scene entirely carried on the broad shoulders on Gleeson, Ken is instructed to kill the hapless Ray by the unseen Harry.

It is the weight of sin that threatens to destroy Ray, despite the debauchery that he and his mentor surround themselves in, as they spend time with the foul-mouthed Jimmy, a dwarf actor starring in a bizarre remake-cum-reimagining of Roeg's Don't Look Now. It is this weight of sin, of having murdered a child, having cut short a life, an echoing of Roeg's dark tale of the grief of loss of parents, that weighs down Ray, that eventually, even before Ken is tasked with his execution, sees him pocket the gun, the end of the film's first half leading to a showdown in a park where each realises the other is trying to kill Ray, either by his own hand, or by silenced gun collected from the beautifully idiosyncratic, and alcove-obsessed Yuri (a scene-stealing Eric Godon).

Up till this point, In Bruges has been nothing short of a masterpiece, a deftly woven intricately made web of bleakly funny comedy, perfect odd-couple portrait and bloody descent into the human psyche at the heart of a millennia-old European city. All of this is upended and cast to the wind by Harry. Harry, on his own, is an excellently wrought figure, an unsettling figure who manages, as only Ralph Fiennes can, to be at once a man utterly in love with Bruges, his disquiet that the town he calls "like something out of a dream" may be besmirched in any way, and a man who is capable of extreme violence, smashing a phone as he is told that Ray has made his escape with Ken's help, and screaming profanities at his wife. Alone, he is a nigh perfect performance.

It's just that, dropped into the grounded, medieval morality play of the rest of the film, with its grotesques and its sinners and its penitent protagonist who finds himself in the purgatorial boredom of Low Europe, Harry feels outlandish, a hilariously over-the top, baroque performance, like Mr Punch arriving midway through Pilgrim's Progress to thwack the sinner with his swizzle stick. He pushes the film onto a more staid, less exciting, and, in all honesty, a more stereotypically crime movie ending, the largely saved, for all its armoury of Chekov's Guns, by its final action scene, which, following a chase, descends into Bosch-ian grotesques in a positive tableaux that Harry stalks Ray through. It's a problem in all fairness, that much of McDonaugh's films seem to carry with them, excellently set up but ultimately messy in their finales, and not one that entirely destroys the film, but certainly makes it less of a classic than it could be.

Nevertheless, its central performances, its script, its tale of a man dealing with his mortality and his sins, about his ability to live with what he has done, the death that he dwells upon, the fragility of human existence, and what he has inflicted upon the family of the boy he essentially murders, are nothing short of some of the best work Colin Farrell has ever put to film. The script, even when Harry is on screen, or where the film crunches through its latter half, is wrought to perfection, and even when the gangster arrives to wreak his own brand of justice, the film never dips below highly enjoyable, from start to end. Rarer still does this genre of film dwell upon the aftermath, upon those left behind, on the empty seats at the Christmas table, and even in a film that only briefly touches upon the season itself, it captures those key themes of a Christian Christmas, of redemption, and absolving of sin, in the manner that only a master-craftsman of narrative like McDonaugh can.

Rating: Highly Recommended.