An extensive look at In Bruges

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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)

Then there’s that shot where Ken’s coked-up head floats into shot over Ray’s shoulder, gurning away. As well as being witty with language and narrative, McDonagh can also conjure up some absurd images.



References: Lonergan, Patrick, The Theatre and Films of Martin McDonagh (London:  Meuthen Drama, 2012)
Peter Beech, 'My Favourite Film: In Bruges' http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2011/nov/18/my-favourite-film-in-bruges?commentpage=3#start-of-comments
Paul Martinovic, 'Looking Back at In Bruges' http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/17919/looking-back-at-in-bruges