In Bruges (Focus Features, Feb. 8) is an unusually thoughtful film for this time of year. With the consideration period for the 2007 Oscars over, it is the season when schlock such as Meet the Spartans and Fool’s Gold dominates the box office.
Impressively, In Bruges, written and directed by Tony award-winning playwright Martin McDonagh, surpasses this strangeness as it unfolds. While its base material is nothing strikingly original, the film-which stars Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson-is so well-nuanced and well-crafted that most audiences will not notice.
The captivating setting of Bruges, Belgium, will be many audiences’ first glimpse at what is said to be the country’s best-preserved medieval town. However, the rest of the film is built around previously explored conventions, such as profanity-spewing hit men who reveal a softer side, as they lay low from a somewhat bungled job.
While these kinds of characters have been used before by the likes of Quentin Tarantino, Guy Ritchie, Robert Rodriguez and their many immitators, it is a pleasant surprise that McDonagh has succeeded in creating a movie that feels entirely new and totally engrossing as his first full-length feature.
McDonagh won the Academy Award two years ago for Best Live Action Short for Six Shooter, which, though it shares a similar motif to In Bruges, is on a far smaller scale in terms of production and literal spacing, taking place in a train car.
While the dialogue between leads Farrell and Gleeson would easily work in front of a live audience, McDonagh makes the film’s namesake setting an active player in the same way that Carol Reed made the ruins of Vienna a co-conspirator in 1949’s The Third Man, and the Coen brothers brought Los Angeles to life in 1998’s The Big Lebowski.
The two actors shift seamlessly between many well-established dynamics without ever seeming contrived. At times, they relate as parent and impatient child, chummy buddy cops, wise veteran and reckless rookie or humorous odd couple. Though Gleeson has explored the role of sympathetic bad guy before, Farrell’s In Bruges role is relatively new ground for the actor.
Though he plays a hitman, he is hardly confident and rarely stoic. Farrell hides his character’s uncertainty, inexperience and guilt underneath a bravado and impatience. One of his best scenes is opposite Clémence Poésy, who played Fleur Delacour in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, who is no less enchanting in the muggle world of In Bruges. The first encounter between the two part-time drug dealers takes an awkward turn as Farrell’s attempts to hide his profession behind sarcasm backfire.
The soul searching that both Farrell’s and Gleeson’s characters experience is accompanied with a heavy dose of dark humor throughout and an ample helping of violence in the film’s conclusion.
The dialogue of In Bruges deserves praise, achieving for cockney criminals what Juno achieved for verbose hipsters. Unfortunately, it is impossible to produce the best of Farrell’s quips without a large amount of censorship, but a line where he punches out an American while cursing Yankees for killing John Lennon is sure to generate laughs and keep Tarantino awake with jealousy.
Elsewhere in the world, post career-killing marriage, Ritchie is left with only film memories as McDonagh takes the crown for crafting movies about entertaining hit men with a colorful personality and a dirty, quirky mouth.
