My brother is following in my footsteps and coming to
Southampton University next September, so I thought I’d write him a guide to
the city, pointing out the best night spots, giving tips on saving money and
avoiding pitfalls. After it was complete I then realised that, hang on,
exploring the city for yourself is half the fun, and that while the guide would
no doubt be useful, it would encroach somewhat on the sense of independence
gained by moving to a new city which I have found to be the best part of university
life. I held back from giving it to him.
EDIT 30/09/13 He went to Manchester, the cheeky git!
It is with this trepidation that I approached an in-depth
analysis of In Bruges – I could write
4000 words explaining exactly what makes it such a marvel, but also I realised that
such an explanation would spoil the fun for those that would make a similar
discovery. Having watching it about 40 times myself and analysed it from every
conceivable angle and memorised practically the entire script I can say with
absolute confidence that In Bruges is
a film that thoroughly rewards attentive viewers. McDonagh has somehow stuffed
every moment with something funny, or engaging, or a reference, or a piece of
sublime acting or character exposition. It’s incredible. So what I’ve decided
to do is split this piece in two: the first part will be a series of things to
think about, without giving away my own interpretation; the second part will be
my thoughts in full. The first half is mostly spoiler free, the second isn’t.
*
Is In Bruges a
comedy? It is unusual to find a film with dark thematic content that is also
packed with jokes – where do McDonagh’s priorities lie?
McDonagh is a first and foremost a playwright, but he was
raised on Hollywood – consider the structural debt owed to theatrical precedent
(Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter) and Hollywood tropes, and how these are interwoven.
Look at how typical Hollywood action moments – the chase, the sacrifice, the
shootout – are subverted.
Try and spot as many set ups from the film’s first half as
you can, and how they appear in the second half. There are loads.
McDonagh has dismissed suggestions that his own relationship
with religion (he gave up his childhood Catholic faith) has leaked into In Bruges, but Catholicism and religious
iconography always lingers in the background, and is occasionally brought to
the fore. Consider why, and what purpose it serves. The paintings of Hieronymus
Bosch are also important to In Bruges.
Why are there so many children in this film? Why are they so
frequently imperilled? Why are they so central to Harry’s motivation?
Think about tourism and sightseeing, in relation to the
medieval buildings, and the contrast between the modern world and the past.
A multitude of nationalities make up the cast of characters,
with frequent mistaken assumptions and voiced prejudices about where they are
from. What is that trying to say? How does Jimmy fit into this?
Continuing from that, there aren’t many films written from
an Irish perspective. How are clichés of Irishness subverted and/or maintained?
How do Ray and Ken differ? What do they represent? How are
they ‘judged’?
What does McDonagh do with the Irish folk song, ‘On Raglan
Road’?
Pay attention to how much of an incredible badass Marie, the
receptionist hotel owner is.
There are parallels between Ray and Colin Farrell. How does
the casting of Farrell change Ray?
Brendan Gleeson, man. Brendan Gleeson. Try and work out if
you’ve ever seen a more beautifully acted final moment.
The phone-call scene – look at the rhetorical tricks
McDonagh uses, count the expressions on Gleeson’s face, count the cuts, count
the duration.
Clemence Poesy, man. Clemence Poesy. Do we like Chloé, or do
we just think she’s fit?
Can the gay slurs and racism, particularly from Ray, be
justified?
Where does it fit into the Irish cinema canon? Is it even an
Irish film? It is set in Europe and was made with British and European money.
McDonagh himself has Irish parents but is a Londoner, only going to Ireland for
regular holidays.
What does the ending ask us to do?
There’s probably an essay-length answer to most of those.
*
In Bruges is
billed as a comedy – a black comedy, to be precise. It’s easy to see why the
marketing guys reached this conclusion: it’s funny while being thematically
dark. It deals with death, child abuse, suicide, morality and judgement, hence,
it is a black comedy, right? No. A black comedy is a comedy that finds humour
in darkness. The jokes in In Bruges are
not really dark jokes. The inanimate
fucking object! line, the jokes about Tottenham, dwarves, the Vietnamese,
alcoves, and the slapstick violence – none of these are ‘dark’ jokes. Only
occasionally does it stray into dark comedy. In general, however, the jokes are
light, the thematic content is dark, but the two rarely leak into one another.
So it definitely isn’t a black comedy, but nor is it a
straight-up comedy. While undeniably a funny film, humour is not McDonagh’s
primary objective. If you remove the laughs (if that is at all possible) I
would argue you still have a great film with depth, resonant emotions, a
wonderfully balanced plot and strong thematic content. In Bruges is a serious drama which uses humour as a counterpoint to
the sadness at its heart. It almost feels like a coping mechanism.
Martin McDonagh is one of the most successful playwrights of
the last few decades, and his plays are performed all over the world. There is
a rumour circulating the internet that McDonagh is the first playwright since
Shakespeare to have five plays running simultaneously in the West End before
the age of 27; this is sadly a myth. Despite his critics, however, McDonagh is
nevertheless a hugely successful playwright. There is a tangible influence on
the film’s structure from McDonagh’s grounding in theatre. Harold Pinter’s play
‘The Dumb Waiter’ is used by McDonagh as a structure for the first half of the
film, and what can be described as the atmosphere of Pinter’s plays is also
evident in In Bruges. In The Dumb
Waiter, two hitmen are sent by their boss to hide out in a basement in
Birmingham. They bounce off the walls for a while, growing irritable with each
other, until the order comes through: Mr. Cranham has to kill Mr. Blakely.
(Cranham and Blakely are the pseudonyms that Ken and Ray use when they check into
the hotel.) There are obvious parallels with the plot of In Bruges at work here. Furthermore,
McDonagh’s dialogue can be described as ‘Pinteresque’
in the way he uses silences to derive menace. This is particularly evident
in the film’s best scene, the tortuous phone call between Ken and Harry. It is
shot in one take and relies entirely on the acting performance of Brendan
Gleeson and McDonagh’s superbly crafted dialogue. The moment when Harry refers
to (the still living) Ray in the past tense, ‘he wasn’t a bad kid, was he’,
thus implying that Ken is to kill him, is a truly sublime piece of scripting,
and Brendan Gleeson plays the moment out perfectly.
The Dumb Waiter arc terminates roughly at the end of this
scene and it becomes somewhat more ‘Hollywood’; appropriately, the scene begins
with Touch of Evil showing on Ken’s
television. Even though he made his name in theatre, McDonagh has riled the
theatre establishment by professing a greater debt to Hollywood films such as
those by Quentin Tarantino, who is an over-used comparison by critics. There’s
the snappy dialogue, of course, but McDonagh also makes use of classic
stand-bys like the “shoot-out”, referred to as such in a moment of
self-awareness from Harry, a chase, a noble sacrifice, a Russian arms deal and
so on. These are all (Yuri possibly notwithstanding) subverted to some extent:
it feels like McDonagh wants to pay tribute to American action movies while
manipulating them to his own end. The chase ends when Harry gets tired, loses
his bearings and has to consult a map. The shootout is ridiculous, and Harry
and Ken, having reached a stalemate, choreograph the following sequence using
strange notions of “fairness” based on an in-grained knowledge of chase
protocol. Ken tries to make a shot from the top of the Belfry, but he is
thwarted when he discovers the square is blanketed in mist. He then tries to
short-cut his gun to Ray by jumping out the window with it, but the gun smashes
to pieces under him. Ken is ruthlessly denied his “Hollywood moment”. The
ambiguous ending is a further example of McDonagh’s desire to eschew Hollywood
conventions.
During a first half in which nothing much happens plot-wise,
McDonagh sows various seeds, which sprout in the second half. This may not be
all of them, but: the $4.90 the stickler Belfry-man refuses to accept for the
$5 entrance fee is later sprinkled by Ken from the top of the tower to warn those
below of his impending messy arrival; at the top Ken pretends to shoot Ray down
below, but when it comes to making the actual shot later it is too foggy; the
fat American who Ray and Ken warn of the steepness and windiness of the stairs
has a heart attack, closing the tower; just as he looks to have made his
escape, the police haul Ray back to Bruges for hitting the Canadian; the
macabre figures found in the Hieronymus Bosch triptych that Ray and Ken study
come to life in the final scene and pass a wounded Ray by forebodingly; Eric
gets his revenge on Ray for blinding him, even though it was all his fault,
really. It’s intricate, and small, seemingly inconsequential moments return
again and again in a far more significant form. I think this ties into the
theme of judgement, and how we are accountable for our actions.
“Murder, father”
The plot (although not the film) opens with a Catholic
confession. The events that follow in Bruges are Ray’s “confession” to the
murder of the little boy, and we are asked to judge Ray on whether his
deeply-felt remorse and pledge to offer his life to the bereaved mother is
sufficient to make up for the death of the boy. The ending is ambiguous, with
the voice over spoken in the past tense to deliberately confuse chronology.
Does Ray live? I don’t think he does, but I’m not sure that’s the right
question. A better one would be, Is he redeemed? And if you are religious then
it would become, I suppose, Does he go to heaven or hell? Ken and Harry are
also judged, and both are found wanting. Ken suffers an undignified encounter
with the pavement, and Harry is killed by his own rigid morality. McDonagh is
intolerant of people that only take one viewpoint (ironically, had Harry been
willing to see things from anything other than his absolute point of view, he
would have discovered that the “child” was in fact Jimmy, a dwarf. What goes
around, comes around.)
McDonagh is an atheist and described In Bruges as the ‘ultimate Catholic guilt film’ and that he wasn’t
‘trying to say that much about religion’. Well, inadvertently, he has.
Religion, and I’m borrowing heavily from my dissertation here, seems to infect In Bruges. Gargoyles loom, effigies of
Christ look on disapprovingly and figures from Hieronymus Bosch’s demented
paintings of the final day on earth break free from the canvas onto the streets
of Bruges. If you have ever been to Bruges you will know that there are
churches everywhere – bar Rome and I
dunno, Jerusalem, it must have the highest density of churches of anywhere in
Europe. In Bruges finds religion
problematic: the reason the boy was in the church where he was killed was, in
the film’s most heart-breaking moment, for committing the sins of 1. Being
moody 2. Being bad at maths 3. Being sad. It is ridiculous that the boy should
have to ask forgiveness for these oh-so-grave transgressions. In addition, the boy’s
death creates an inescapable association between violence against children and
the Catholic Church, which has the real-world connotations of institutionalised
paedophilia within the Church. It is clear that Catholicism is not looked on
favourably, but while other non-religious people might not include it at all,
in In Bruges it is nevertheless there, an inescapable force that shapes
the entire film whether we follow its doctrines or not.
A little more on the child abuse within the church: there is
a suggestion that Harry was sexually abused as a child by the priest that he
orders Ray to murder. I’ve never been one to take deleted scenes too seriously
– they’re deleted for a reason – but one depicts Harry as a child in the
company of a man who wears the same ring that the priest did. Harry also
describes this retrospectively as the ‘last happy ‘olliday that [he] ever had’.
This is contradicted at one point when Ken says Harry ordered the priest’s
murder over a housing project, but Harry could easily be lying about this; he
doesn’t seem like the type willing to admit to having been abused. His primary
motivation throughout the whole film is the preservation of children and
vengeance upon those who have hurt them; he is unwavering on this even when his
morals say he has to turn his gun upon himself. He refuses to fight Ray while a
pregnant woman (Marie) could be caught in the crossfire, and he is livid when
Ken calls his kids cunts (although that’s hardly an overreaction). This is what
makes Harry a great character: his motivations are borderline honourable, he
just has two critical, fatal flaws. One is that he takes vengeance against
transgressors of his code to unusual, deadly extremes, and the other is that he
can only see the world from one point of view, a characteristic common to
McDonagh’s baddies. The two conspire against him in the final scene. He thinks
he has killed a child and thus he must, going by his rigid morals, kill
himself, and he won’t listen to Ray, who despite being riddled with bullets,
tries to tell him that the “boy” is in fact a dwarf. One criticism I have of
Harry is that his murder of the tower guard is motivated simply by annoyance,
which goes against his honourable psychopath persona and shows him to be a
cold-blooded killer instead.
*
The characters of Ray and Ken are shaped by a series of
oppositions. Ray is youthful and impetuous; Ken is old and careful. Ray finds
sightseeing tedious and has little care for history; Ken enjoys it and feels a
certain tranquillity amidst all the old buildings and that. Ray engages with
the locals; Ken does not. McDonagh sides with Ray on these fronts in a
surprisingly decisive manner. Ken is enthused by, for instance, a phial of
Jesus Christ’s blood while Ray shuffles his feet impatiently, declines and goes
and charms a girl on a film set. However, Ken’s approach to history is only
ever on a superficial level; his enjoyment derives from being amongst old
things while never really engaging with them. For Ken, Bruges is a tourist
attraction and the peace he feels comes from the town’s aesthetic rather than its
people. Even though he professes to an interest in the Catholic history of
Bruges, he never views the facades as anything other than just that: a façade.
For Ken, the architecture is only skin deep.
It is perhaps ironic then that it is Ray, the one with an
apparent utter apathy towards Bruges, that ends up restoring life to it. Ray is
drawn to people and while his encounters do not always have happy outcomes, he
at least engages with them, as Ken does not. The most obvious example is Chloe,
with whom Ray begins a relationship. He also befriends a dwarf actor, Jimmy,
offends three Americans and two Canadians, and blinds Chloe’s former boyfriend,
Eric. Most of these encounters pass Ken by, who is off wandering about Bruges
aimlessly. He does strike up something of a friendship with Marie and is
bemused by Yuri, but other than that he distances himself from others.
It appears McDonagh has made a deliberate attempt to examine
European relations, on which Ireland was for a long time perched on the fringe,
separated from Europe by its great rival, Britain. Bruges itself seems to sit
outside Europe, too. Belgium is a country that has had its identity dragged
around by its larger neighbours more than most, and its capital, Brussels, is
home to the European parliament due to Belgium’s largely inert political
position. In addition to this, Bruges in life and in In Bruges, is an anachronism, a time capsule of the past, altered
little in the last five hundred years.
I see this as having parallels with Ireland’s position
within the European community. McDonagh is critical of Ken’s inability to
engage with the locals, and Ken, being representative of old Ireland with its
lingering Catholicism and moral conservatism, allows for this criticism to overlap
into an allegory for Ireland’s distance from Europe during the greater part of
the twentieth century. Ken sees Europe as an other place, not necessarily a bad
place by any means, but somewhere resolutely unfamiliar full of people Ken does
not understand. Ray, on the other hand, is representative of a post-Celtic
Tiger Ireland which integrated at last into the European market place. A result
of this is that Ray is less religious, more Hollywood than Holywood (Farrell
was an incredibly astute choice for the role), and capable of seeing Europe and
Europeans as something other than a tourist attraction.
Stereotypes play a prominent role in how the characters
relate to each other. Ray is incredibly prejudiced against Americans, and sees
every American as responsible for John Lennon’s death and the Vietnamese war.
The Americans that do appear, of course (Jimmy excluded), are obese and are
oblivious to European notions of personal space. They are, in one of the film’s
repeated lines, “loud and crass” (and fat), and Jimmy repeatedly has to defend
himself from accusations of being an American by saying “yeah, but don’t hold
it against me”. The Dutch characters are Amsterdam prostitutes, naturally. The
English character is a cockney gangster and the bad-guy of the piece. The
Russian character, Yuri, is – what else – an arms dealer, albeit one far
removed from traditional Russian mobsters.
And then, of course, there are Ken and Ray, members of the
nation that suffers perhaps the worst stereotyping of all – particularly on
film – the Irish. A result of massive Irish immigration to the United States in
the latter half of the nineteenth century into the twentieth, clichés of
Irishness have existed in American cinema since the earliest days. Arcadian
imagery projecting Ireland as a rural idyll inhabited by red-headed,
good-natured drunkards with a penchant for a good brawl offered second and
third generation immigrant Irish populations an idealised homeland. The gift of
the gab, leprechauns and luck are further endlessly perpetuated stereotypes.
Ray’s character seems split in two on this issue: one half
fully and deliberately plays up to many of these clichés, while the other half
doesn’t. His ‘gift of the gab’ allows him to talk his way past a security guard
and charm Chloe enough to get her to go on a date with him. When Ray tucks into
a much longed-for pint he declares, and it is written in the script as such,
‘dis is da foif’; later he boasts to Ken about the number of pints and bottles
he has worked his way through while maintaining (relative) sobriety. Ray is
frequently violent too and, aside from the obvious exception, it is slapstick
violence and played for laughs. Examples include the bottle-swinging Canadian
woman (bottles were previously identified as lethal weapons by Ray and Ken),
his karate-chop on Jimmy (you don’t know karate! *chop*), and the way he blinds
Eric is ridiculous if not laugh-out-loud funny (of course you can’t see, I just
shot a blank in your fucking eye!). Ray embodies the representation of Irish as
exotic Celtic “other,” which allows the audience to put distance between
themselves and the otherwise cruel acts of violence Ray commits.
I would argue the reason McDonagh gets away with using
slapstick violence to enable cliché is that the moral core of the film centres
on an act of pre-meditated murder that has a horrific, unexpected consequence.
Ray’s guilt over the accidental death of the boy hangs over the entire film and
has the effect of making the smaller acts of violence tragi-comic threads in a
wider tapestry of anti-violent sentiment.
*
My favourite character in the whole film is, as much as I
love Ray, Ken and Jimmy, the hotel owner, Marie. When people use the phrase
strong women, sometimes they mean a sort of globe-straddling Beyoncé character,
or a kick-ass female action hero that can mix it with (and beat) the boys. I
don’t really believe these unobtainable figurines can be considered strong
women, not in a real sense. They don’t have real people problems, and can get
out of difficult situations either through immense wealth or talent. Marie is
different. Marie is a strong woman and an awesome lady even though she is only
a modest hotel owner, which she runs with her husband, Patrice, whom we never
see. At breakfast on the second morning, Ken tries to apologise for the sweary
message left by Harry, but, in the presence of a lady is unable to bring
himself to describe Harry in language he is familiar with. Marie finishes his
sentence – ‘cock?’ – and Ken can only smirk in pleasure at her unexpected foul
language. Take that, gender norms! This is just a minor incident, however.
Marie’s golden moment is when Ray and Harry end up in a stalemate at her hotel
during their shootout. Itching to carry on their shootout but unable to do so
due to Marie’s presence, along with her unborn baby, Harry asks her kindly to
leave so they can continue to kill each other. Ray implores her to do so, too,
assuming she will do what he says because she is a woman. However, Marie
refuses, plonking herself down on the stairs, and, despite being visibly
terrified by the presence of two armed maniacs, tells them to fuck off and put
down their guns and go home. Her stubbornness and bravery get the better of Ray
and Harry, and they devise a bizarre plan to continue the shootout elsewhere.
That is real bravery, not film bravery. She risked her life and her baby’s life
in an attempt to dissuade Harry and Ray from their violent and destructive
path, not in an effort to save other people, but to save them. Patrice is a
lucky guy. I honestly can’t think of any characters that can match Marie for
nobility and courage. One of the cop-outs in McDonagh’s follow-up, Seven Psychopaths, is that women are
always useless in Hollywood films; Marie feels like McDonagh’s response to
this.
So, Marie allows us to tick the feminist box, but what about
the film’s other female character, Chloe? How do we regard her? Obviously
Clemence Poesy is unfathomably beautiful, but Chloe seems largely superfluous
to the plot. McDonagh grants narrative significance to all kinds of odd things,
but Chloe doesn’t seem to do much at all. It is on his date with Chloe that Ray
heeds the Canadian, and it is Chloe that picks him up from the police station
after he is hauled back to Bruges for assault, and it is through Chloe that Ray
ends up blinding Eric who informs Harry of his presence out of revenge, but
other than as an enabler of other characters, Chloe does very little.
The first thing we learn about her is that she is
cine-literate, and provides a useful analysis of the dream sequence Jimmy is
currently filming ‘…a pastiche…homage is too strong – a nod of the head?’ [to
Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, with which In Bruges shares many similarities].
As with Alabama in True Romance, cine-literacy
is a highly-prized quality for women in film-world, and Chloe is thus
idealised. This is possibly undercut by the revelation that she sells cocaine
and heroin to Belgian film crews (and ketamine to a dwarf), and that she also,
on occasion, robs tourists with Eric. She is far from being the film’s moral
authority. To some, maybe, this gangster streak would make her a badass, maybe
a ‘strong woman’ in the misguided sense discussed above; to me it makes her a
bit of a bitch. An incredibly attractive bitch.
*
That’s mostly it covered, but I just want to highlight some
of my favourite bits.
As mentioned previously, the phone call scene between Ken
and Harry is the best in the film. The scripting is fantastic, and watching Ken try and get to grips with Harry’s
child-like speech patterns and sweary petulance – “how can swans no be
someone’s fucking thing!” – is a delight. Count the expressions and emotions
that Gleeson puts into the performance, all in one take too. It’s a wonderful
performance. Gleeson is magnificent throughout, but perhaps my favourite
Gleeson moment is the death eye roll he delivers while lying splattered on
Bruges’ main square. It puts all other eye rolls to shame. That, and the “I’m
going to die now” is the culmination of perhaps the only real dark joke, but what
a dark joke it is. As pointed out earlier, although Ken is a good character and
one we are supposed to sympathise with, McDonagh doesn’t seem to trust him at
all and makes his death an utter failure. Thus, after being shot in the neck in
the stairwell of the belfry, McDonagh borrows the stirring Irish folk song ‘On
Raglan Road’ by Luke Kelly to build up his sacrifice as a noble moment, a
fitting end for a man who has made the decision to protect his friend even if
it means losing his life. Then, at the top of the tower, the square is shrouded
in mist, and Ken can’t make a shot. In one last effort to get his gun to Ray
before Harry reaches the bottom, Ken jumps off the top. His gun smashes to
pieces under his bulk, leaving a panicked Ray to fend off Harry alone. So,
despite the stirring music and appearance of a great sacrifice, Ken has utterly
failed to protect Ray. Ruthless as fuck from McDonagh, there.
That dog. That fucking dog. The one that looks at Ray on the
bench in the main square. The ugliest dog in the world. That dog. It kills me.
I made it my Facebook cover photo for a while (Trivia: the film’s other dog,
the dog that sits facing out a window in the opening montage, actually lives in
Bruges and sits at that very window)
