John Michael McDonagh (2011)

John Michael McDonagh has been in his brother’s shadow for some years.  In an interview with Sight and Sound, John Michael explains that he never resented Martin’s success in the theatre but that it was hard to bear when the younger McDonagh won an Oscar for his short Six Shooter and had a big hit with In Bruges.   John Michael has now got his own back with his debut feature The Guard, which he also wrote.  First screened at this year’s Sundance Festival and released in cinemas in July, this black comedy is already the most commercially successful independent Irish film in history.  It has also garnered good reviews.  The protagonist of the title is a County Galway Garda, name of Gerry Boyle (Brendan Gleeson), whose approach to policing is unorthodox, to put it mildly.  FBI agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle) is spending time in Ireland, helping the Gardai modernise their crimefighting methods.  Boyle and Everett come to form an unlikely partnership trying to solve a murder.  At first, this looks to be the work of an occult serial killer but the killing turns out to be the tip of an iceberg of bribery, blackmail and drug trafficking.  McDonagh uses the scenario to take a pop at the national police force, assorted other Irish pieties and the tropes of policy buddy movies, and the result – thanks largely to Brendan Gleeson – is very entertaining.

The pairing of a super-smooth black detective and a lumbering, politically incorrect, small town local cop might seem at least as old as In the Heat of the Night but the reversal is more complicated now.  The key line in The Guard, delivered more than once by Everett to Boyle, is, ‘I can’t tell if you‘re really motherfucking dumb, or really motherfucking smart’.  Boyle’s cynicism about the Gardai appears fathomless.  He despises, in word and deed, PC-ness in all its manifestations.  He’s evidently shrewder than any of his colleagues or bosses or the hyper-educated Everett or the drug smugglers they’re up against (and the Irish police chief who’s in cahoots with the traffickers).  Boyle is not, though, quite as smart as John Martin McDonagh; and other characters in the film, although essentially stupid, are educated when it suits their creator.  Driving in their car, the three drug traffickers (Liam Cunningham, Mark Strong and David Wilmot) swap facts and sarcasms about Bertrand Russell, Dylan Thomas et al.  Even the thick Irishman of the trio (Wilmot) pedantically takes his companions to task for confusing ‘sociopath’ and ‘psychopath’ (he can’t remember the difference between them although he knows he had it explained to him during a spell inside).   In other words, McDonagh is showing off.  The Guard might seem to do for the Gardai what Father Ted did for the Irish priesthood but the Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews characters are more tightly and securely written.  Still, McDonagh writes funny lines in abundance, and most of them are expertly delivered.  I especially enjoyed references to Vladimir Salnikov[1] and the lyrics of ‘Ode to Billy Joe’ – partly because I’m old enough to get them, partly because they seemed particularly eccentric.

The tone wobbles most when Gerry Boyle shows his softer side.  McDonagh wants the audience laughing at Boyle’s outrageous humour but also feeling good that we’re connecting with a nihilist who, deep down, is compassionate and humane.  It’s just about OK when Boyle visits his dying mother (Fionnula Flanagan) in a nursing home, because she’s as sharp-tongued as her son (they share, as well as sarcasm, a love-hate affair with Russian novels).  It’s more of a problem that Gerry, after enjoying his day off in a hotel room with two prostitutes dressed in police gear (Sarah Greene and Dominique McElligott), turns shocked and protective when, later on, one of these girls is beaten up by another client.  This core of feeling is phony because McDonagh isn’t interested in taking it seriously – in suggesting, for example, that the ‘decent’ Gerry is at odds with his cynical side.

Boyle shows excoriating scorn for the clueless enthusiasm of his new colleague Garda Aidan McBride (Rory Keenan), who’s just transferred from Dublin.  This hapless rookie gets himself killed before his first day in Connemara is out.  The sensitive scenes between Boyle and McBride’s widow (Katarina Cas) of Garda Aidan McBride (Rory Keenan) shouldn’t work – it’s lucky for McDonagh that Brendan Gleeson manages the blunt tonal shifts so easily that he covers up the gaps in the script’s characterisation of Boyle.  An effortless comic actor, Gleeson dominates proceedings.  He gets good support from Liam Cunningham and Mark Strong as the two main criminals.  Strong, playing the only Englishman in the story, gives him an intimidating look and a solemn existentialist soul that are a genuinely comical combination.  Others in smaller oddball roles (Pat Shortt, Darren Healy, Michael Og Lane) do well too.  As Everett, Don Cheadle’s good but never quite as funny a straight man as you feel he should be.  Rory Keenan appears to mistime a couple of bits of physical comedy but he’s amusing and likeable as the ill-fated Aidan McBride.  (In fact, McBride’s death throws The Guard emotionally out of whack – the effect is rather like the killing off of the Jennifer Tilly character in Bullets Over Broadway.)   The enjoyable score – a pastiche of the Ennio Morricone themes for Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns – is by Calexico.

13 September 2011

[1] Gerry Boyle’s swimming prowess is a significant element of the plotting in The Guard.   Boyle reckons to have finished fourth in the 1500m freestyle final of the Seoul Olympics, in which Salnikov made his great comeback to win his last Olympic gold.  Fourth position in that race was actually filled by an American swimmer called Matthew J Cetlinski.