Runtime: 1 hour, 51 minutes
Rating: R
Director: Martin McDonagh
Quick Impressions:
What a weird movie! Seven Psychopaths, Martin McDonagh’s follow-up to his (by some standards) hit debut feature In Bruges is easily the strangest film I’ve seen all year. That’s not an insult (or a compliment either, actually).
Before seeing the movie tonight, I’d heard lots of people compare it to Quentin Tarantino’s films, and now that I’ve seen it, I have to say, that comparison seems way off to me. I mean, yes, on the most superficial level, both Seven Psychopaths and your average Tarantino project include scenes of graphic violence mixed with scenes of long conversations. But Seven Psychopaths does not feel like Tarantino at all to me.
Actually, the dramatized imagined ending to the film-within-a-film that Sam Rockwell’s Billy proposes feels more like Tarantino than the…what’s the opposite of film-within-a-film? The film-without-a-film? (It’s more than a frame story because it’s the main narrative. I kind of like calling it “the film-without-a-film” since the story centers on a screenwriter’s efforts to come up with a script to fit his chosen title Seven Psychopaths. All of the action in the movie occurs because Colin Farrell’s distractingly named Marty finds himself without a script, and hence without a film.)
Before I go any further, let me make it clear that Billy’s ending is like a bad imitation of Tarantino. I’m not trying to insult Tarantino. I’m a fan and personally wanted Inglorious Basterds to win Best Picture (though I knew it wouldn’t happen). But though Tarantino and McDonagh both use graphic violence and long conversations in their films, they use these elements differently. Tarantino’s graphic violence has a giddy manic energy missing from Seven Psychopaths. McDonagh’s conversations have a soulful depth, sort of an aching pain (and a surety that the soul is eternal) that you don’t usually get in Tarantino.
I’m not trying to call Tarantino’s work inadequate (far from it). I’m just trying to point out that if you approach Martin McDonagh’s work with the assumption that he’s trying to be like Quentin Tarantino, you’re going to think Seven Psychopaths is a spectacular failure. But that’s not because McDonagh is trying and failing to be like Tarantino. If anything, the audience is failing to take McDonagh on his own terms. (And I actually think whoever edits the movie trailers is doing McDonagh a tremendous disservice because the previews for both his films are guilty of overselling the comedy and action and downplaying the soul-searching and philosophy.) McDonagh succeeds brilliantly in being like McDonagh.
(Besides the obvious director/screenwriter and lead actor connection, Seven Psychopaths has quite a bit in common with In Bruges tonally). Perhaps as McDonagh continues to make films, audiences will come to have a better understanding of his work in its own terms.
The movie that Seven Psychopaths did remind me of a bit was Adaptation. (Again, the experience of each movie is totally dissimilar, but the gimmicky premises are quite alike. I’m not going to draw out the similarities here. If you see both movies, you’ll know
what I’m talking about immediately.)
My husband noted, “There have been a lot of movies about writing a screenplay lately.” I haven’t noticed a particular rise recently, but maybe I just haven’t been paying attention.
I mean, there are always lots of things written about the writing process. It’s easiest to write about what you know, after all. So writers just love to write about writing! They always have. They always will. (Trust me. I’m a writer myself. In fact, I’m writing a book all about writers writing drawing on my own experiences of writing my writing.) (Just kidding.) (Partially.)
The declaration that “I’m writing a screenplay about writing a screenplay,” or “I’m writing a novel about writing a novel,” or “I’m writing an essay about writing an essay,” is all too common and usually met with reactions ranging from “How wonderful for the pedagogy of our craft!” to “You suck [because you’re a self-absorbed, solipsistic, lazy egomaniac: implied].”
In general, I’m fascinated by metadrama (the whole, play-within-a-play thing) and have been for a long time. And, of course, personally, I connect to the storylines involving the frustrations of creative writers because I am a frustrated creative writer.
But this subgenre is really over-burdened, easily dismissed as self-indulgent, and too easily actually self-indulgent. (You can quickly get bogged down in the gimmick and end up saying only that you like to say stuff and wish you had something to say.) Of course, great writers use the “writing about writing” thing to say something more. (I often feel like the only person in the entire world who isn’t in love with The Tempest, and most people who love it probably don’t even think of it as a piece of writing about writing because Shakespeare makes it so much more.)
I know it’s taken me a long time to get to the point, but here it is—Seven Psychopaths has one. (A point, I mean.) In fact, it makes a pretty emphatic point, and the writing-about-writing gimmick and not-quite-Tarantino-like graphic violence and prolonged conversations are only vehicles for making that point.
Personally, I think Seven Psychopaths, if not a great film, is at least a film that puts forward great ideas. McDonagh (well on his way to becoming a great director) actually has something to say, and he says it very memorably and in a remarkably distinctive way. (This movie is many things, but formulaic is not one of them, for all its metadramatic, tongue-in-cheek meditations on formula.)
And now that I’ve said that much, let me add that Seven Psychopaths might actually be a great film. I’d need a few more viewings to decide that. Already, just getting some distance from the film has improved my opinion of it. (The longer I think about it, the better it seems.) I could easily write ten essays about it. (And ten more essays about the process of writing those essays!)
The Good:
Hollywood really is obsessed with psychopaths right now. (And not only Hollywood—independent films, foreign films. Even the BBC television series Sherlock makes its Holmes a self-proclaimed “high-functioning sociopath” whose nemesis also has psychopathic tendencies (or at least aspirations).
Why? Why are we all so eager to pay so much attention to deranged killers or those who do not seem able to empathize with others in a neurotypical way? (And why are we so fuzzy on what the terms sociopath and psychopath mean precisely when neither term is used as a diagnosis in the DSM IV? Clearly our lurid fascination has nothing to do with science or healing.)
McDonagh seems very interested in this question. He’s also ready to start up a debate about what it really means to be a pacifist. How many self-proclaimed Pacifists really put their ideologies into practice when push-comes-to-refusal-to-shove? What would happen if more people were Pacifists and more Pacifists remained committed to carrying out their principles? (As someone who chose a Civil Disobedience theme for several rhetoric classes I taught, I’m really fascinated by questions like these, so earnestly explored by McDonagh who refuses to keep the discussion theoretical.) Also, is violence ever justified? Is violence ever sane? Is society itself psychopathic? Does the media enjoy portraying society as psychopathic? Do these words even mean anything? What does mean something?
The great part about McDonagh’s film is that it addresses huge social issues that are enormously relevant while at the same time taking issue with how and why people make films while at the same time exploring the writing process while at the same time offering thrills, laughs, action, and characters with genuine heart. (And also there’s a really cute dog in the movie!)
Most Oscar Worthy Moment (Martin McDonagh):
I don’t actually expect McDonagh’s script to be nominated for Best Original Screenplay. In fact, I don’t expect this movie to receive any Oscar nominations at all. Now, the Golden Globes are a different story. For In Bruges, Colin Farrell did win Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy at the Globes, who are usually very kind to non-American actors and directors. But this year, Les Miserables will offer pretty stiff competition in the Musical or Comedy category. Plus, the way the Globes do it, we can also expect Argo, The Beasts of the Southern Wild, and probably even The Master to be categorized as comedies. (Argo really might be.)
So, I think Seven Psychopaths will be out of luck.
However, it’s still very early, and you never know. Seven Psychopaths might sneak into
Original Screenplay. I highly doubt it, but the sequence that begins with Marty finding Hans’s recording, and concludes as Hans finishes dictating it is pretty powerful. The first group conversation in the car on the way out to the desert is also extremely well done, probably the best scene in the movie.
Most Oscar Worthy Moment (Sam Rockwell):
If any character stands out here and seems to scream, “See me! See me!” at Oscar voters it’s Sam Rockwell’s Billy. Although I’ll admit Rockwell is a good actor, I’m not always a fan of the characters he plays and the projects he chooses. His performance here, though, is definitely something special. Billy is so strange, and Rockwell remains committed to the bizarre character right to the end.
He’s great in the scene in the car. I think his other big scene involving the car is also pretty well-played.
Most Oscar Worthy Moment (Christopher Walken):
Walken gives the most emotionally resonant performance in the movie, but I think he has a snowball’s chance in hell at a nomination. Walken gets all of the most dramatic moments. He’s situationally the most sympathetic chracter, the one with tremendous integrity and all the best lines.
I’d gladly give him an Oscar for the scene in the bar when he listens as Marty tells him his story. That moment really packs a punch.
Other Performances:
Colin Farrell deserves some credit, too. He has a wonderfully expressive face, and I’ve always thought he’s compelling to watch. In recent years, he has really matured as an actor and is delivering some fantastic performances. He’s very strong here in the least showy part.
The part of Charlie was originally meant for Mickey Rourke who dropped out of the role taken over by Woody Harrelson. Time and again, Harrelson has demonstrated a gift for comedy. He has wonderful comic timing and seems to enjoy playing characters most people would regard as strange. So much of the movie wouldn’t work if Harrelson didn’t manage to sell his obsession with his Schih Tzu and his bizarre and inappropriate temper. He manages to make Charlie comically ridiculous but believably anguished all at once. He does a fantastic job.
Zeljko Ivanek (whose existence spellcheck refuses to validate and who also appeared in In Bruges) excels in a small part as do Harry Dean Stanton, Gabourey Sidibe, Olga Kurylenko, Long Nguyen, and Linda Bright Clay.
Funniest Scene/Best Joke:
I laughed out loud over and over again at the scene in the car when Billy offers his own take on the oft quoted line generally attributed to Gandhi, “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.”
The scene in the car is truly fantastic. The pace picks up at this point, and we finally begin to see the point of the whole movie as it all falls into place before our eyes.
Best Action Sequence:
It’s hard to beat the action sequence that Billy proposes in his imagined ending to Marty’s film, but I actually like the way the real final showdown plays out, particularly Billy’s dramatic and (comically) devastating gesture as it ends.
Best Scene:
My favorite scene is the one I already called out, the proposed film scene exploring the journey of the “Buddhist psychopath” as suggested and described by Christopher Walken’s Hans. I particularly like Walken’s line evaluating how the scene ends. He delivers the line very well, and the entire scene is incredibly powerful.
Runner-up:
Harrelson’s scene with Gabourey Sidibe is the highlight of the film to that point.
The Negatives:
Some things about this movie didn’t feel quite right. The resolution of the storyline of the Zachariah character (played by Tom Waits) didn’t seem adequate to me. I think, more than anything, the character is included as a kind of weird red herring just to make viewers less sure that they know how everything will play out. When we saw a little more of his story, I was pleased. But that “little more” made me hunger for even a little more than that.
Also the beginning of the movie is almost flat. More than anything, the tone seems unclear. Is this film supposed to be a comedy? The jokes don’t come very fast. It’s not all that funny. The characters are all a little weird. And are we supposed to be focusing on the story-within-a-story or the main narrative? Is this whole thing going to turn out to be a dream? Which storylines and characters matter the most? Which character (if any) can we trust?
By the time you figure out that Seven Psychopaths is actually a pretty philosophical and soulful meditation on the nature of the human condition and the role and nature of Violence (always at war with Pacifism both within the human race and within every human), the movie is half over. On a second viewing, this would probably improve, since we’d know what kind of movie we’re watching right from the start.
The opening scene seems a little weaker than it wants to be. I was told it was like Tarantino, and it does seem like Taratino—with dialogue that isn’t as clever. The ending of this scene is very welcome and a huge improvement on the scene’s beginning, but then the pacing slows and everything gets a little confusing. The story seems to lose momentum because we don’t know where to focus. A second viewing would improve these things, but what happens when audience members walk out before the movie is over because they’re fed up with being confused and exasperated? (Of course, I’ve never walked out of a movie—except to follow someone who was ill or when I was ill myself. If you do walk out of movies regularly, I think you’re likely to miss out on some great cinematic moments because of your own stubbornness and impatience. (So there!)
Still, it’s easy to imagine people getting exasperated.) To be clear, I did not want to walk out, but we were in the theater completely alone, so audiences may not be connecting with this movie, and it could be because the beginning is different than what they expect.
Something else that seems really odd to me—the women don’t have much to do. Olga Kurylenko’s role seems stronger than Abbie Cornish’s, though the former has less screentime. That makes sense because this phenomenon is called out later on in a nice little metacritique by Christopher Walken. But here is what’s puzzling. The only women who do have substantial parts, the only women who actually do anything that means anything or dominate the scenes that they are in are African American.
Now, mind you, I’m not complaining. There are far too few strong parts for African American women in movies in general. I just wonder what McDonagh is up to. Maybe he’s just calling out the racism of American movies and audiences.
(I mean, you notice that these women are African American. If we were a colorblind society, we wouldn’t notice.) But that seems a little unfair because the characters themselves explicitly call it out over and over again. It’s not like the characters’ race is ignored. Even when telling his backstory, one character is sure to mention the race of the woman involved. I am really not sure what is going on here. Perhaps it’s McDonagh’s way of calling out the oppressed-become-oppressors-by-seeking-justified-vengeance trope which often is exploitatively employed by ultra-violent movies. He’s definitely up to something, and I’d like to know what. Maybe I’ll come away from a second viewing of the film with greater insights. Who knows?
Overall:
At first Seven Psychopaths seems a bit too clever (and a little too slow) for its own good. After watching the whole thing, however, I’d say that these apparent failings of the movie were really my own failings for going in with a faulty set of expectations. Seven Psychopaths is not without its flaws, but it’s still a really entertaining movie that actually has something to say (and not just a clever gimmick for saying it). Based on his first two feature length films, I’d say Martin McDonagh has tremendous talent as a director and definitely a distinct voice and vision as a screenwriter. I look forward to his future features and would like to see Seven Psychopaths again.