(Future is now: July and Linklater, in the calm before the storm. Image by Todd Cole, courtesy of Roadside Attractions. Don Cheadle and Brendan Gleeson, in The Guard. Image courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.)
Two films, Jon Michael McDonagh’s The Guard and Miranda July’s second feature, The Future, premiered at Sundance and are now expanding in national markets. I prefer July’s brand of detached precociousness to McDonagh’s cynical bluster, though both are fairly compelling examples of idiosyncratic filmmaking.
The Guard, a first feature, playfully stitches and recombines various styles and forms to impudent and stylized ends. It luxuriates in the sordid sleaze of certain late sixties British crime thrillers.
The parts are more successful than the whole. Very little of the movie has a moment of truth or realistic detail, but the movie's lusty manner is sharply developed out of the characterization, local color, thrilling situations and especially pungent dialogue.
The filmmaker is the younger brother of Martin McDonagh (In Bruges). The Guard is somewhat problematically a copy of a copy. The younger McDonagh also traffics in the same mixture of profane, verbose and slangy dialogue with an astringent edge and scabrous flair for violence and macabre wit.
That’s the good; the bad is he shares his brother’s weakness for self-reflexive threads that are cleverly self-defeating, creating a stylistic remove that prevents the director from ever truly engaging the moral ramifications of the material.
The movie is a bravura showcase for the great Brendan Gleeson. He plays the eponymous sergeant of a stunningly beautiful Irish coastal village in the largely Gaelic-influenced western isles. He’s introduced in exaggerated close up, surveying the wreckage of a car accident and the young victims, pill popping thrill seekers who failed to negotiate a sharp curve. Their bodies strewn about, their flesh disgorged and caked on the streets and sidewalks, he looks about and says, for exclamation, “What a great fucking day.”
Gleeson’s character, Gerry Boyle, is a shambling and flamboyant role that is equal parts Falstaff and Quixote. He’s an inveterate hedonist with outsized vices and predilections, like a fondness for recreational drugs and prostitutes. Openly insubordinate of his superiors he holds attitudes that are charitably less than progressive or cultural enlightening (“I thought only blacks, or Mexicans, were drug dealers,” is one characteristic outburst).
He’s also one of those outrageously contradictory figures of Irish lore, a littérateur with little patience for Russian novelists and a cinephile (he’s caught one night watching Polish director Jerzy Skolimowsky’s great English film, The Shout).
The plot’s a mélange of familiar ideas and genre staples tossed about. McDonagh is far less interested in traditional story structure than incident, form and style. He yokes together everything from the guard’s new partner, the big city naïf (Rory Keenan) with a personal secret and his beautiful, fragile Romanian wife (Katarina Cas) to the cross cultural buddy cop standard, here represented by the inscrutable and uptight American FBI agent, Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle), who’s turned up in Boyle’s village to intercept an international drug smuggling ring.
I like Cheadle, he’s open and funny, but he’s a little too enamored with accents. It floats all over the place in this movie. He intuitively understands his place in the dramatic firmament and never tries to rebel his secondary standing.
The movie’s gangsters are an unholy trinity (Liam Cunningham, Mark Strong and David Wilmot) impressively drawn in miniature. The problem is they are never given the necessary dimension or fullness each seems capable of. They're arrogant and self-regarding, colorfully rendered in small and sharp glances, like their fondness for quotations (from Bertrand Russell to Nietzsche), given to freewheeling rants about the unsavory nature of their business or the considerable difficulty of making distinction between a psychopath or sociopath.
The plot moves fairly haphazardly and indirectly. The gangsters project the necessary menace. The fun and pleasure develops more in the asides and off-color touches that say a lot about Ireland (though very little about the country’s current economic meltdown). Gleeson is fantastic in the private exchanges and back and forth, like his conversation with a local IRA operative (Pat Shortt) who’s trying to return a cache of found weapons. You have gay lads in the IRA, Boyle inquires, a tad surprised.
“It’s the only way to infiltrate MI5," is the nonplussed answer.
McDonagh has some visual flair and talent as well. Working with a very good cinematographer in Larry Smith, he shoots impressively in widescreen format, drawing on the textures and scraggly formations of the landscapes and water with a verve and thrill. If the movie never quite becomes anything other than a lark, the material lacks any depth of feeling or nuance.
(The death of one of the film’s most appealing characters is particularly cruel in how easily it is disposed of.)
The movie‘s tone is sometimes a bit too awkward. One subplot, the cop‘s dying mother (Fionnula Flanagan), seems imported from another work. The women, in general, are given exceedingly little to do. Fortunately, the actors certainly grab your attention and infuse the movie with a sometimes jolting lift and buoyancy. It has a moment to moment color and style that floats along easily.
The Guard is smart and shrewd enough to acknowledge its limitations without ever trying to truly transcend them. It’s pleasurable without being deep.
Five years after her delicate and gracefully observed debut film Me and You and Everyone We Know revealed a thoughtfully engaging new voice, Miranda July expands her range and emotional subtlety with the intriguing and sharply realized follow up.
The new film collates her different talents and sensibilities in interesting ways. In the interim between her two films, July has worked in video installation and most significantly, writing short fiction. Her story collection No One Belongs Here More Than You refined her sensibility and help sharpen her trenchant and colorful feel for mood, tone and indirection.
Like the title suggests, the movie is coolly ambiguous and colored by different impulses and references encompassing science fiction, magic realism, time travel and the transmogrification of the soul.
“Have you ever been outside,” is the opening line of the movie, spoken by the film’s unorthodox narrator, a feline called Paw Paw (voiced by July). The cat is the connective tissue of the loose limbed story reflecting the quiet desperation of the movie’s central couple, Sophie (July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater). They live in a cramped Los Angeles apartment. He’s a computer tech specialist; she’s a dance instructor for young children. Together for four years, the relationship is not exactly in a free fall though deadened by a sideways inertia.
Both are torpid and cut off emotionally and given to petty jealousies (in a sharp and telling note, July’s character is obsessed by the viral popularity of a colleague’s video clip). Their adoption of the cat is meant as a signal of their increased responsibilities and selflessness. Medical complications require the cat remain in specialized care, and the couple are tasked to return in a month’s time.
July is especially convincing at the personal impasses and acute disappointment of lingering failure. The subtlety emerges in the forlorn and sidelong passages, like the way a fallen portrait on the wall reveals a phone number. She is drawn to the ineffable, the slippery and uncontrollable. One such moment leads to a very impulsive act, a phone call that ignites an affair with Marshall (David Warshofsky), an older single father of a precocious adolescent daughter (Isabelle Acres).
He’s an entrepreneur and Sophie is drawn to his strength and quiet competence. July intriguingly and quixotically fractures all of that. Rather than sharpen the question of the romantic triangle, July spins the work further and further out of balance.
The remainder of the story shifts between alternate realities that are possibly dreams, imaginings or most intriguingly, Jason’s projection of her new life that beautifully suggests Jacques Rivette’s modernist classic, Celine and Julie Go Boating. (Given July’s anti-compile pronouncements, that’s probably a leap on my part.) The Rivette reference seems especially apt in the peculiar and gorgeous way July suggests Jason and Sophie have merged and exchanged identities.
As a format, video tends personalize the most intimate of details. Even more so than her first feature, The Future is an uncanny self-portrait. July mocks her own inability to think or create conventional art (like Sophie’s stunningly unsuccessful attempt to produce her own video clip). Her fearlessness is inseparable from her tender awkwardness.
The resonance of the first film developed out of the terrific ensemble (July showed an especially strong touch with teenagers). The new film marks a tremendous improvement stylistically and visually. Shot by Nikolai von Graevenitz, the movie is both supple and nimble. The imagery is filled with suggestions of entrapment and defeat.
July also remains alert to new ideas, such as a terrific the lives of her two best female friends fast forward directly in front of her, their settled and accomplished lives a stark contrast to her own wanderings and confusion. Even though she is very much in control of the film, July does not monopolize the movie. She is generous with the other actors, especially some beautiful vignettes about Jason’s developing friendship with an older widower (played by a nonprofessional named Joe Putterlik who died after the filming was completed).
As accomplished as The Future is, it is not to all tastes. The precociousness gets a bit thick at times. Even so, this is often breathless and quietly wonderful. I certainly hope the separation between her second and third feature is not nearly so as the first and second.
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