John Michael McDonagh (2021)
‘L’Afrique‘, announces David Henninger (Ralph Fiennes) on the ferry carrying him and his wife Jo (Jessica Chastain) towards the Moroccan coast. David’s tone of voice, jaded and cynical rather than excited or intrigued, is a taste of many line readings to come in John Michael McDonagh’s The Forgiven, adapted by the director from Lawrence Osborne’s 2012 novel of the same name. David is a London-based plastic surgeon. Jo’s a published children’s author though it’s some years since her last book. The Henningers don’t have kids of their own and it’s soon clear they loathe each other. Jo brands David ‘a high-functioning alcoholic’; he reckons that the adjective neutralises the noun. They spend their first few hours in Morocco drinking and sniping before starting a four-hundred-mile road journey to Azna, where they’ll be guests at a house party and stay for three nights. ‘Long way to go for a party’, David observes irritably, especially since the hosts are Jo’s friends rather than his. The couple are still arguing when, on a dark, dusty road, David’s speeding car hits a teenage boy, killing him instantly.
Unlike David, the film’s audience has seen this boy before. Driss (Omar Ghazaoui) excavates fossils in the area, along with his friend Ismael (Aissam Taamart), another young Berber – to sell to foreign tourists. The victim’s ethnicity compounds David’s reaction to the accident as a maddening inconvenience, the last straw on a vexing day. He does put the dead body in his car but arrives at the Henningers’ destination – the luxurious home of Richard Galloway (Matt Smith) and his live-in partner Dally Margolis (Caleb Landry Jones) – expecting to turn Driss over to the local police and have done with the matter. Of course, David doesn’t get away with accidental homicide so easily. The police are prepared to confirm the death as an unfortunate accident but the next day Driss’s father, Abdellah Taheri (Ismael Kanater), turns up at Richard’s villa-cum-castle to claim the body as that of his only son. The father’s interpreter, Anouar (Saïd Taghmaoui), explains that Abdellah is insisting that David, as a matter of honour, accompany them to the Taheri family’s village, several more hundred miles away, to witness Driss’s funeral.
There’s a seeming contradiction between David’s heartless view of the youngster he has killed and his decision not simply to leave Driss’s corpse in the road. Bringing it to Richard’s place and the police’s attention is bound to involve David in questioning, however perfunctory, that he’d rather avoid. A main reason why he holds on to the corpse is to enable the host and his guests to echo David’s post-colonial callousness in minimising the importance of what’s happened. In his hyper-violent buddy comedy War on Everyone (2016), John Michael McDonagh seemed to have a soft spot for his indefensible protagonists – the ‘bad cop, worse cop’ duo played by Michael Peña and Alexander Skarsgård. But the title of his previous film could be applied to this latest one: McDonagh now appears to loathe all his characters – the privileged white ones, at any rate. In their conversation before the accident, Driss talks to Ismael about the ‘cruel’ ‘faggots’ in Azna. He might well be referring to the bitchy double act of limp-wristed Richard and outré Dally. Their weekend visitors include an American financial consultant (Christopher Abbott) and a British aristocrat (Alex Jennings) – the one a practised seducer, the other a relatively superannuated hedonist, though he brings along some airhead hangers-on. The able actors nail these nasty articles instantly but McDonagh, as usual, is too fond of the sound of his own writing voice. After condemning themselves out of their own mouth within a few lines, the party people keep talking for the best part of two more hours, without revealing hidden depths or any new sides.
It’s not easy to believe that David, albeit reluctantly, agrees to Abdellah’s demands – even unloving Jo is concerned for his safety on the expedition (‘they could be Isis!’). That he does agree is crucial to the plot, though, and, once the narrative bifurcates, David’s desert odyssey is all that The Forgiven has going for it. The scenes at the villa are inert. The few people who don’t join in the somewhat listless debauch are there purely to react to what the hosts and their friends get up to (Jo does drugs and has a fling with the American moneyman, etc). Hamid (Mourad Zaoui), the head of Richard’s house staff, observes proceedings with discreet, appalled dignity. A French journalist (Marie-Josée Croze), covering the house party for, presumably, a Hello!-type magazine, briefly excoriates British and American attitudes towards the Arab world. In doing so, she merely gives Richard, Jo et al the opportunity to come out with a few more obnoxious aperçus.
The basic set-up of The Forgiven brings to mind Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky (1990), based on Paul Bowles’s 1949 novel. An Anglophone husband and wife whose marriage is in trouble come to North Africa in the hope of rekindling their relationship. David and Jo Henninger’s marriage is in much worse shape than that of Bowles’s Port and Kit Moresby, and their efforts to pep things up are both more trivial and more futile. In both cases, however, the couple concerned soon runs into unconsidered local difficulties (in David’s case, literally so) and an unavoidable separation leads to one half of the partnership – the wife in The Sheltering Sky, the husband in The Forgiven – travelling deeper, and dangerously, into African territory.
David’s journey is short on dramatic incident and the standout twist – Abdellah reveals that he speaks English – has no more than immediate impact. Your first thought is: so Driss’s father understood every word of David’s scornful, xenophobic response when Anouar first explained Abdellah’s demands. Your second thought is: but the Englishman’s face and body language during that tirade spoke volumes anyway. On the drive back to Azna after the funeral, David doesn’t ask the surplus-to-requirements interpreter why he assisted in the pretence of Abdellah’s having no English. Abdellah is fluent in David’s language chiefly in order to lecture him on the predicament of young Arab men like Driss, who sell pieces of their cultural past in the hope of partaking in Western materialism. It transpires that Abdellah’s son was trying to sell not just any old fossil but a particularly valuable trilobite that he stole from his father. One of only three known examples of its kind, the trilobite, because of its stellar rarity, is referred to locally as an ‘Elvis’.
This side of the narrative is absorbing, even so, thanks to Ralph Fiennes. His psychologically layered playing of David makes McDonagh’s storyline more plausible than it might otherwise be. Fiennes’s troubled presence gets you wondering if there are reasons other than plot necessity why David puts Driss’s body in his car, and why he agrees to attend the funeral. The actor’s ambiguity also ensures that David’s eventual admission to Anouar – that he’d been drinking, was speeding and distracted when he hit Driss, and then searched the teenager’s pockets for ID which he buried at the roadside – doesn’t come across as a dramatically mechanical mea culpa/volte face. Fiennes gives the impression, rather, that his character’s cynicism has been, throughout, an expression of self-loathing – that David is now simply too exhausted by the experience of recent days to pretend anything else.
David returns to Azna aware that his penance in the village isn’t enough to earn Abdellah’s complete forgiveness, unsure of how the outstanding debt will be charged to his account. He finds that out as he and Jo drive back from the villa along the road where Driss was killed. They find Ismael waiting in exactly the same spot. Against his wife’s urgings, David gets out of the car, Ismael points a gun at him and David urges him to shoot. The boy is scared stiff but eventually obliges. Ralph Fiennes gives some credibility even to this melodramatic finale. He seems to have taken as the key to David his recollection, about halfway through the film, of his father’s view that the world is such an awful place you can only laugh at it. The pessimistic sentiment makes a kind of sense not just of David’s persistent sarcasm but also of his final self-sacrifice.
Ismael Kanater’s penetrating gaze – Abdellah really does seem to be looking into David’s soul – contributes to the strength of the later exchanges between him and Ralph Fiennes: these are the film’s strongest moments. For the most part, though, the characters are too thinly written to dispel the feeling that the actors playing them aren’t being sufficiently stretched. This is especially true of Jessica Chastain, much too good for her poor role. Larry Smith’s cinematography and Willem Smit’s production design are similarly expert in depicting what is a very obvious contrast – the vast distance, spiritual as well as geographical, between Richard’s villa and Abdellah’s village. The credits appear at the beginning, in red letters, with the star actors’ names shown last. This throws you rather. It’s a mark of how disappointing The Forgiven proves to be that the credit sequence is the most disorienting thing in the whole film.
8 September 2022
