20 The Debt
Like Spielberg's Munich, The Debt involves IDF (Israel Defense Forces) tasked with a retaliation job. Unlike Munich, it is entirely fictionalized. In the late 1990s, Rachel Singer (The Dame Helen Mirren) is speaking at her daughter's book unveiling, which covers a mission that she undertook in 1966 along with her ex-husband Stephan (Tom Wilkinson) and David (Ciaran Hinds). Rachel and Stephan show up at the unveiling to much applause and reverence; David does not. That's because David has just been flattened by a giant truck.
Rachel and Stephan thus begin to re-hash why exactly David wanted to kill himself and most of that story unfolds via flashback. "Yep, her again" Jessica Chastain (not that this is a bad thing) plays 1966 Rachel, with Sam "Man on Ledge" Worthington as David and Marton Csokas as Stephan. As Mossad agents, their mission is to bring down a Nazi war criminal nicknamed "the Surgeon" who is in hiding out in Berlin. Whether or not they fully accomplish their mission becomes the film's central question, and how that question affects their 1997 lives is also incredibly provocative. Joe Maddon (Shakespeare in Love, Proof) directs, and the way that the film jumps back and forth in time is both effective and easy to follow. The film's weakness is that it hits a decently long lull in the middle that involves the mission, and that the mission itself is less exciting than everything else. But everyone performs well--the 1966 trio pulls off a pretty strange love triangle--and the way that the past interacts with the present is evident in the emotions and worn-out faces of Wilkinson and Mirren. Here, they can't escape the past until they fix the present.
#19 The Guard
When I was a kid, my father wrote and directed a play called "Bon Voyage Brendan" about Ireland's famed explorer, saint Brendan. It was performed later on at Mikeaukee's Irish Fest, and it was there that my dad met a comedy duo called dD'unbelivables, comprised of Irish funnymen John Kenny and Pat Shortt. A couple years later, we would take a trip to Ireland and stay at Jon Kenny's house and hang out with both of said Unbelievables. About 2/3s into the Guard, this fella shows up wearing a cowboy hat and possessing a trunk full o' guns. All these years later, I recognized the Irish cowboy as our old pal Pat Shortt. This wasn't the first time my family had crossed paths with stars-my mom acted with Gary Sinese in high school and her friend Jeff Perry was both Angela Chase's teacher on My So Called Life and shot to death by Sawyer on LOST-but it was just one of the many pleasant surprises in The Guard.
The Guard (police in Ireland are known as Gardai, which is shorthand Gaelic for "Guardians of the Peace of Ireland") stars Brendan Gleeson as a swilling, whoring and absolutely hysterical small-town Irish cop named Gerry Boyle. A couple of uncharacteristic murders stir things up in his neck of the woods, and shortly after he begins investigating them, Agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle) shows up as part of a FBI task force that cries foul of international drug trafficking. And yes, he gets paired with the uncouth and racist Boyle to help take the smugglers down. There is a bit of the buddy-cop Gibson/Glover format in place here, but the outrageous performance of Gleeson stops it from ever reaching stale territory. The Guard is the first directorial offering from John Michael McDonagh, who is the brother of famous Irish playwright Martin McDonagh (In Bruges) and it is a very impressive debut. Sure, the small-town murder drug-corruption piece has been done before, as have the witty and verbose criminals. But in Gleeson's Boyle, we get a truly unique and amazingly loutish outlook. Rent this one. Laugh hard at Irish one-liners. Repeat.
No comments:
Post a Comment