Django Unchained

Tarantino’s latest offering is, like Kill Bill, a pastiche, albeit a little less direct. This time, the melting pot contains three things: spaghetti Westerns, blaxploitation and Deep South plantation drama – which after all isn’t the Wild West. It is very much a wish fulfilment fantasy, drawing many comparisons with Inglorious Basterds for being a bit of bloody catharsis for the great ills of the history of White civilisation, championing one of America’s underdogs. It’s a long way from the cleverly disjointed, extremely character-focused, nuanced and snappy early Tarantino works that are what made him great, but those aren’t the sorts of films Tarantino makes any more. He makes sweeping epics with lots of self-conscious nods to filmmaking and bold stylistic statements that have fallen out of mainstream direction, and has a whole lot of fun with them. The result tends to be something that consciously can’t be called great, but is extremely entertaining to watch and contains unforgettable ideas, superb characters and performances and flashes of absolute brilliance.

Django is a slave given the opportunity to escape his cruel fate by the grace of a white man. Well, that’s how some critics are spinning things, but let’s be fair – this isn’t a story that could be told about the era without that level of facilitation. This white man is another outsider – a German immigrant, very possibly but by no means certainly a German Jew (who can after all be nationalistic and like the same things as Wagner did), who masquerades as a dentist but in actuality makes his living as a bounty hunter. He needs Django because Django can identify some marks for him. So good at it does Django prove himself that they partner up for a longer term, and the charismatic German is sufficiently moved by Django’s search for his wife (named after Brunnhilde) to offer to help him. Unfortunately, she is now the property of one of the most merciless slave-owners in the South.

Much of this works brilliantly. The dehumanized black man gets to rise up to kill the abusive slavers if they have a price on their heads – though one harrowing scene at a farm gives shades of moral grey. The good doctor’s way of doing things is very flamboyant, letting people think he is simply a deranged murderer before he reveals the truth. There’s also a brilliant comedic scene where a proto-Klan argue about the difficulty of seeing out of their white hoods. It’s all very comic book, even slapdash. There’s almost a wilful lack of attention to details and continuity – witness the amount of beer going up and down in the glasses, or bullets making a clinking sound as they land in snow. That doesn’t even seem to be the right year for the Civil War. But this is self-conscious filmmaking, constantly drawing attention to itself. Look at these faded stars, given the Tarantino treatment. Listen to this original Morricone composition, with all that spaghetti Western heritage. Yes, if I want to, I will just slap words on the screen for exposition, and have a 70s-style theme song.

It’s not a well-plotted piece, it makes a point of its unoriginality, and really it should have ended at its false end. If the intended message was that you can save a whole lot of bloodshed and misery if you swallow your pride and admit you’ve lost when you’ve lost, as the good doctor could not, that got a bit lost. As soon as Django killed the Australians who could have helped him (including a pot-bellied Tarantino doing a rather odd accent and drawing attention to himself, without a director to tell him to do it better), it became clear that this wasn’t about a good moral message and Django was no good guy: to get his way, he would slaughter everyone, including one defenceless woman who had done nothing but been born to the same mother as the bad guy and, I suppose, failed to totally overhaul the entire social order of her day, who he could easily have let go. The puddle of blood grows huge as Django’s revenge is completed, and while Tarantino is of course known for his violence, I missed the meaningful blood and suffering of Reservoir Dogs.

But for all it was imperfect, it was of course fun, as mediocre comic books are fun, and there were undeniably fantastic performances. Django himself will win no Oscars, but Christoph Waltz’s Doctor Schultz is in with a shot, and Samuel L. Jackson as an Uncle Ruckus type with a real sharp edge behind the scenes was fantastically-played. Much to praise, then, but not a whole lot to keep praising after the layers have been peeled back, very possibly in some horrific torture scene.

A question that persists: if the workers know it’s an act, and the massa knows it’s an act, who does Samuel L. Jackson’s character do the Uncle Tom performance for? Only guests? Isn’t that…really annoying and silly for those in the know?

Lincoln

Stephen Spielberg’s bounce back from the now more-or-less universally decried Indiana Jones revival, helped along by JJ Abrams’ tribute to his style in Super 8, needed a heavy-hitter in the vein of his Schindler’s List or Amistad to really herald his return to full force. And with Lincoln, he has it – a mature, unpatronising, almost cheese-free historical biopic with some incredible performances that are sure to win a variety of awards and doesn’t have the somewhat hollow sentimentality of War Horse. Here, the mawkish scenes are kept more or less entirely to the bookends of the film – a rather silly opening scene in which Lincoln sits in a chair like his famous memorial and has two black soldiers and two white soldiers come and offer different points of view to him, as well as reciting his speeches back at him, and an ending that while not nearly so hard to believe has a rather awful crossfade from a flame in a lamp to an historic speech.

But the two and a half hours between those points are quite special. Slow at times, heavy undoubtedly – but still engaging, consummately-performed and easily able to keep the viewer immersed in a time of great suffering but great retrospective glamour. The sets are perfect, the casting superb, the wigs and makeup so well-done you notice them only when you are supposed to and the dialogue just the right mixture of formality and believable irreverence.

Central to it all, of course, is Daniel Day-Lewis, who is everything a top Hollywood actor ought to be – acting only in a select few films, avoiding celebrity gutter press and each and every time he appears in front of a camera stunning his audience with a superlative dedication to his craft and outstanding natural abilities. Deservedly, he may well become the first person ever to win the Best Leading Actor Oscar three times in a matter of weeks. That he is the son of one of the people I am writing about in my thesis always gives me a small surreal thrill, but in all honesty that is forgotten within moments of seeing him appear, because he so completely disappears into his character. He may seem an unlikely choice for Lincoln, not even American, but the facial resemblance is certainly there, and it’s quite brilliant how he pitches the performance so that it’s not too dissimilar from that iconic deep, commanding drawl from a thousand documentaries, cartoons and halls of presidents, but softened, taken up an octave or two, and given several notches of kindly old man.

The rest of the cast are also incredible. From characters who have nothing to say but ‘Aye’ or ‘Nay’ but put in a lifetime’s convictions into the word to Lincoln’s misunderstood and long-suffering wife, and especially Tommy Lee Jones as the best kind of loveable curmudgeon with such acerbic vitriol in his speeches that he can make an admission that he is going back on a lifetime’s convictions before his parliament sound like a victory just by turning it into an insult, he is a firey and irascible foil to Lincoln’s fatherly calm.

Not everyone will have a great love for this film. Those with extreme political opinions will find much to fault – on one side, there will no doubt be cries that the film does nothing to represent the South’s point of view and paints them as cardboard villains, and makes Lincoln out as too much of a saint, all the while massaging white liberal guilt. On the opposite side, no doubt there will be cries that this is nowhere near enough, that making a film patting whites on the back for having finally made progress and stopped enslaving other races is just patronising, especially making money from it, and that if the message were sincere, filmmakers and audiences alike would be doing more in the name of restitution. But both are based on political agendas, and it’s better to enjoy this as a slice of a time and a political manoeuvre than anything else. 

Crusade in Jeans

This moderately costly and well-produced 2006 film is an obscurity. It’s vaguely possible that people in Holland know of it, but in the majority of the world it went completely unnoticed and doesn’t have a single critic’s review on Rotten Tomatoes, meaning that presumably it didn’t get any press screenings, or most likely any screenings outside Holland at all, despite being entirely in English and the only celebrity on the cast – Emily Watson – being British.

So why did I watch it, and with quite a deep sense of emotion? Why has it been sat on my hard drive for – quite literally – years with me always a little scared of it? Well, that’s because I have quite the personal connection with it. Indeed, I feel like it was a crossroads in my life, and that is why I’m writing this. Not really for any critical purpose. Not because it had any impact at all on the world of cinema, or will ever get the sequel its cliffhanger promises and for which the remaining half the novel could supply a screenplay. But because I thought I was going to be in it, and when that never happened, I rather gave up on the acting career path altogether – to the extent I almost never talk about it. Had I got the part, my life would have been very different and I probably would have spent the rest of my life pursuing acting as a career, with the very strong element of a feature film role beefing up my CV. And while none of the young actors who had major parts have gone on to have stellar careers, both the actors who got the parts I was considered for have appeared in other films, and the boy who got the main part also has a career in music, essentially living a life I would like. This is about personal catharsis.

If I recall correctly, it was in early 2004 that I had the auditions for the film. I remember because at the audition I chatted with Harry Eden, who was a lost boy in the then-current Peter Pan had also starred in the difficult Real Men. Whether he was offered a part in this film I will never know, but I suspect it would have clashed with Polanski’s Oliver Twist, in which he played the Artful Dodger.

My agent at the time was very enthusiastic about my chances for this role. She knew me as literary, and the only one on her books likely to have heard of the Dutch children’s book Kruistocht in spijkerbroek, or Crusade in Jeans. I hadn’t, but I was easily capable of reading it in a few days and doing a good impression of someone who had. It was a pretty poor book, really, about a teenager who uses his mother’s experimental time machine for his own trivial ends, mixes up days and years and ends up part of the semi-historical Children’s Crusade in 1212, with all anti-Islamic rhetoric carefully sidestepped. The young hero, whose name surprisingly remained Dolf for the film (it’s short for ‘Rudolph’ rather than ‘Adolf’), ends up passing as a noble, mystifying others with his odd clothes and futuristic artefacts and soon becomes a hero to the good kids and a threat to the nefarious manipulators intending to sell the children into slavery.

The early scripts were pretty awful – I think still have some of the early drafts, involving horribly awkward dialogue where Dolf played music on his iPod and convinced followers that Marylin Manson was the voice of the devil, thankfully changed by the filmed version to a more palatable ‘troubadour in a box’ bargaining tool – and the final draft has awkward mistakes, like Carolus apparently coming back to life with nobody commenting. Interesting characters are melded into a dull love interest. But I got very invested, practised like hell and memorized audition dialogue. I passed an audition, but meeting the casting agent, was quite saddened to hear he didn’t see me as Dolf – he thought me too old, something in my eyes betraying a bit too much knowledge to be the likeable boy hero. That’s fair enough, really – I was never the blonde hero type, a quality the lucky guy who was cast exuded, and in all fairness I think he looked better with his shirt off than I would have. Instead, I was considered for Vick, the thuggish bodyguard, who is a secondary character but given an inflated role in the film (not even killed off), and I came around to this quickly, with much to relish in the role, which I thought I could make cold and slightly sinister. There was another audition stage, a group session where we took part in various exercises, and I’m confident I distinguished myself. At the end of it, I happened to look at the casting assistant, and she gave me a huge grin and a big thumbs-up. I left thinking I would at last get to be in a film, and just needed to wait for the call.

Well, the call never came. I never heard from them again – as is usual for that world. The chance came and went, and in the end I wasn’t cast – instead, some rather forgettable fellow played the role in a very straightforward schoolyard bully way, which may well have been the perfect way to do it, and I suspect did well because he looked like a rather less handsome version of the hero – which I don’t say in any attempt to be rude, as it’s an interesting casting decision. For my part, well, I wouldn’t as I suspected have looked too old, not at all (most of the cast are a bit old for their book counterparts), but if anything I would have looked too similar to the horribly miscast Nicholas, the spacey boy prophet.

I had watched bits and pieces before, to see what the guy who got the role I had wanted looked like and how he played it, but I couldn’t bring myself to finish until finally I decided I wanted to watch something live-action and had nothing else. A vindictive part of me smirked at how clearly the film was going to fail, how poorly it was done, but oh, I would have been proud to have been a part of it, and I would have loved to have played any of those parts and had the life that could have gone with it. Instead, after this never came to pass, I drifted through a few more stage roles in Cambridge, put my heart and soul into Alan Strang, realized that I was at the age where I’d be expected to do romantic roles and that I utterly loathed the part of acting that demands you perform physical acts of love with someone you do not love, and drifted away from it and into music. I didn’t pay for a new set of pictures for Spotlight, and that was the end of my having an agent. I was approaching the end of university and I imagined that within a year I’d have a career playing the drums, and a book published. Well, these things have failed to come to pass after all, at least so far, and I’ve largely drifted. It traces back to this, at least in my head. It was my last chance to be an adolescent actor of note, and it passed me by.

I don’t expect this to be read by anybody. But it’s something I’ve wanted to write out for a long time. I won’t let on that it’s personal, and just link it as usual from my Facebook. If anyone stumbles upon it, well, perhaps it will be of interest. But I doubt they will. I don’t promote my film blog so the only people who read it are friends – who don’t care for obscurities.

Les Misérables (2012)

Les Misérables is amongst my very favourite books, if not my favourite. It is also likely my favourite musical. This is often a surprise to lovers of the book, as so many hate the adaptation – as well as being very sick of musical lovers who pretend they have read the book then are revealed to only know the story in the musical – but as a matter of fact I enjoy both as very different properties. I keep them separate and enjoy each for what it is, though admittedly with every fresh adaptation like this one, a part of me hopes Gavroche will be transformed to his more thoughtful, vulpine, brotherly form from the novel rather than the irritating little cliché of the film. But hey, the familiar story goes that it was the Artful Dodger who inspired the adaptation to happen at all, so…

Anyway, this version I was not particularly looking forward to. The trailer stirred no emotional response from me at all, other than thinking Fantine did not sound very powerful, and Russell Crowe could not sing. Well, on the former point I was admittedly very wrong – though I’m afraid the latter stands. Overall, though, I ended up liking this far more than I’d expected.

There was much brouhaha before the release about the way actors sang live on camera – and not in the way of the old musicals, essentially filmed like a modern-day concert with less cranes, but with the sophisticated cuts and angles of modern filmmaking. Well, I find myself sceptical that all the vocals were recorded during what we saw on screen, partly because multiple cuts would totally change their flow and be a nightmare to mix, and partly because I really don’t believe Hugh Jackman was singing as he and Javert were fighting with sword and wooden plank with no effect to his breathing. But what we did get were some truly remarkable sequences where a single shot was held – when Valjean first decides to turn his life around, when Fantine has fallen to her lowest and when Marius sings of the empty chairs at empty tables – and we have something quite unique, something that cannot be captured in a musical, and which completely justifies the technique and the hiring of film actors rather than singers: close-up performances where every nuance is clear and every breath, every sniffle, every waver is caught. It works rather brilliantly.

Most of the cuts to bring this down to an appropriate running length are good, too, snipping here and there and thankfully making the only song I dislike, ‘Little People’, not much more than an aside. It was a shame ‘Castle on a Cloud’ was snipped a bit, as the young Cossette really doesn’t get much to do, and the lack of ‘You broke a window pane’ in ‘Look Down’ changes the perception of Valjean’s initial crimes in a way I didn’t like, but otherwise things proceeded nicely.

I definitely think there were a few poor casting choices, though. Crowe is certainly the most prominent. It’s impossible to watch him and not to think of him simply as Russell Crowe struggling, never as Javert. He delivers ‘Stars’ like he’s just singing along to himself in private, and when he switches from his gravely voice to a higher line he sounds absurd. The crucial chemistry between Valjean and Javert thus never properly forms and his complete mental confusion at the end is nowhere to be seen. The girl playing adult Cossette is bland and not very likeable, which makes something of the emotional centre of the film – that more or less everything Valjean does is for her – go missing. And yes, the kid who’s Gavroche is the perfect musical Gavroche…but I still did hope for the gamin of the book, the one with the fierceness of that famous Delacroix painting. There’s also no sense of the book’s M. Bienvenu, but the musical does render him plot device priest #1.

For every miscast, though, there are numerous that are spot-on, and bring that aspect far into a positive light. Jackman, who we all know by now can sing superbly, does a fantastic transformation, carries the role with gravitas and in fact doesn’t miss the barrel chest of most Valjeans. He does seem to affect an odd quasi-Northern accent at the start, though. Hathaway, who got so much negative press before the film was finished, was a superbly damaged, sympathetic Fantine, perhaps the most miserable of the misérables, and made some excellent decisions to foreground suffering over bombast, making her very believable even in an inherently artificial art form. The girl playing Éponine’s tragic love was delicately delivered and she did a lot with very little, making me care more about her than almost any of the others in the cast, and her parents the Thénadiers were brilliantly done by Sasha Baron-Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter, repeating some elements from their Sweeney Todd appearances but stealing the show every time they were on and ad-libbing superbly. Cohen’s ‘How dare you?’ was perfect.

Eddie Redmayne, who plays Marius and who I last saw in My Week with Marylin, was likeable and delivered a very moving ‘Empty Chairs at Empty Tables’, though when he sang falsetto I must admit I was reminded of Kermit the Frog and was glad when the song moved to its main register. I can’t shake the feeling I passed him a few times in University, perhaps in Hall or the bar or even at the ADC, but this may well be false memory syndrome based on recognising him from My Week with Marylin.

Overall, it wasn’t perfect, and if asked whether it was as good as the musical I’d have to say better in some places and not in others, and of course the book is the best overall experience, but it was very good and at the very least it showed me some things I haven’t seen before – which is remarkably unexpected for an adaptation of an old musical based on a very old book. 

Life of Pi

I have to say, Life of Pi was better than I expected it to be. I expected to really dislike it, but I actually quite enjoyed it.

I never read the book. It was recommended to me many, many times but I had taken an instant dislike to it. I read how its premise was taken more or less wholesale from a Brazilian novel about a boy stuck on a dingy with a jaguar. I read how it was rather artificially hanging on the Booker-baiting trend of an Indian setting with magical realism elements, especially when everyone has an oh-so-quirky history, like the main boy who is named after a swimming pool. I read how the boy and the tiger end up coexisting and end up on a fictional island of meerkats, and decided it would be trite and awful and try much too hard.

Nor was I enthusiastic about the film, initially linked to the director who has probably fallen furthest from grace of any I can think of beside Michael Bay – M. Night Shyamalan. He was then removed from it, and though directors I like such as Alfonso Cuarón and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and by the time years had dragged on an Ang Lee finally committed, I felt it was in ‘troubled project’ waters and likely wouldn’t come out of it well, especially as Lee is rather uneven, especially with more populist work.

Still, the film was finally made – and the trailer duly arrived, showcasing some rather lovely CG and annoying me with a motif of words matched with drumbeats. If I had missed it, I wouldn’t have been duly worried, but I caught it.

And yes, I should have given it more of a chance. It asked you to believe a lot less than I thought it would and it allowed for an acknowledged cynicism. There are some fanciful moments with the tiger, but you are never expected to believe it is anything but a wild animal. The island is indeed one of the parts that really stretches credulity, but a plot point was made of that. And though the framing device – about a visiting Canadian writer looking for a story – is lazy, but it also provides a much-needed alternate story. And yes, there is enough beauty in the oceans, as well as hallucinogenic fantasies of the oceans, that there’s a real visual spectacle.

It’s still a concept lifted wholesale from elsewhere, even if the devil is in the details here. Speaking of matters spiritual, I was not keen on the treatment of different religions, made into a quirk that comes over very differently when you remember it’s from Yann Martel rather than from a generalised, rather patronising Western idea of superior spirituality in India. It also still gets quite dull at times. But it is still lovely to look at – especially in 3D – tells a fun tall tale, centres on a likeable character with a likeable fierce tiger companion, and well worth the time to watch in the cinema, even if you can’t persuade me it would be worth the hours it takes to read a book. 

The Hobbit part 1: An Unexpected Journey

While both were fixtures of my childhood, I read The Hobbit rather more. Well, Lord of the Rings was a commitment of all your reading time for weeks, even months, whereas The Hobbit could be read in a few days. But it was a lot more inconsequential and I even came to view it as babyish, especially beside its big brother. The Hobbit makes Tolkien and C.S. Lewis in their little club sharing ideas make much more sense. It is in every way more child-appropriate, simplistic and indeed, superficial. I never really felt Bilbo was in any danger, unlike the members of the Fellowship. The dwarfs were silly griping fellows and for all their roots in Norse mythology, they had silly names and their quest seemed rather abstract and fuelled by gold. The trading of riddles, so iconic now, always struck me as a very unlikely scenario and I resented Bilbo for cheating, even if he did so inadvertently. The ring, meanwhile, even though Tolkien actually rewrote the passages featuring it once he knew how important it was going to be, seemed so trivial, as Bilbo slips it on and off as he pleases – though of course it takes time.

Well, I haven’t read the Hobbit since I was a preteen, but still remember much of it, largely because of family discussions. So I know just how much was added to this film, how much padding and embellishment there was – but that’s quite understandable in an effort to make a rather small quest story epic, and expand it to no less than three full films, which I can’t say I think entirely necessary when they could be getting on with The Silmarillion. The padding hasn’t just stretched the content to three films, though – it’s stretched this film to a full three hours, which is really too long. The first act in particular, when a mass of characters we can barely distinguish from one another are introduced, is long-winded and I am very sure that the main criticism The Hobbit will suffer is that it was dull. I had a very good time of it, recognising hints and references, but I was also aware that had I known nothing of mythology, deviations from the text or what was to come, I may have been bored.

However, bored I was not. A little surprised by sudden changes of scene once or twice, but very soon delighting in the new chapter. More or less all of the additions I loved, especially giving Radagast not only a role but a great and endearing eccentricity, with a very obvious visual clue to how little he cares for the impression he gives others. I was puzzling over who the actor was for a good few minutes, having forgotten the prior announcements but knowing he was terribly familiar, but when I realised it was the Doctor I remember seeing on Saturday evenings, I couldn’t have been more pleased. I hope this leads to Sylvester McCoy having a career renaissance, and his interactions with Gandalf were priceless. Though now I will no longer get to be quite so snobby about actually knowing who Radagast is – until now it was a bit of a bit of geeky esoteria.

The film squeezes in a prologue of sorts with Frodo and the older Ian Holm directly before the opening of Lord of the Rings, which is a lovely nod to the films these quite clearly build from. We are then shown the younger Bilbo, and Martin Freeman does an absolutely excellent job in his usual slightly baffled Englishman role. I may not care much for Sherlock or The Office, but he’s certainly one of the best things in either, and provides a nice Hitchhiker’s Guide link with yesterday’s film, Seven Psychopaths. As Bilbo tumbles into the quest, he gains confidence, and it will be great to see him grow further in the next installations. As well as the familiar encounter with the mountain trolls, the stop at Rivendell, the encounter with the goblins and Bilbo meeting Gollum and finding his ring, the film gives itself more of a structure by introducing a baddy only mentioned in the book as part of the story of Thorin getting his full name Oakenshield. This allows for some pretty heavy action scenes, and gives the film the artificial climax it needs. We also get Radagast encountering Sauron in an early form, and having a rather confusing episode with what will become a Nazgul, here apparently a summoned spirit and not a man who can only be killed by a woman. There are also added appearances from Saruman and Galadriel as well as Elrond, which is great – seeing those familiar faces and getting Christopher Lee another screen credit is never a bad thing. Also present is Stephen Fry – his voice, at least – unexpectedly as a goblin king with a huge wobbling chin I’m sure insecure Stephen will quietly fret over. The eloquence of this hideous creature and his sublimely awful singing make for an excellent casting choice, turning what could have been a highly forgettable character into a very memorable one.

The dwarves are more memorable than they might have been, too. Though some are little more than ‘the fat one’ or ‘the daft one with a slingshot’, others get distinguished well, though of course it’s Thorin that does the most growing – and comes over as far more formidable than in the book. James Nesbitt’s one scene shows his great talent at seeming like a lovely guy in just a few words, and the guy from Desperate Romantics as the one bizarre good-looking and non-squat dwarf gets to stand out as a character as well as a face with his naivety and careless tongue.

It was long and in summary, doesn’t feel that action packed, but it was in fact very enjoyable and I’m looking forward to seeing Beorn, hearing Smaug and cringing at the spiders in glorious 3D – and yes, the 3D was exemplary here.

I may well go and see The Hobbit again, too. After all, I saw it in 24fps, which I had no complaints about, and was happy I saw first, but I am curious about the controversial 48fps. I remember when making a film for my master’s course, we were far happier with the lower framerate, the higher looking too amateurish, but I do want to know if it looks different large-scale. Perhaps I will see. I can’t see it being a more dramatic transition than that from film to digital, and we barely noticed that.

I’m also glad Jackson returned. I adore Del Toro, but…this just wasn’t the project for him.   

Seven Psychopaths

Seven Psychopaths just by the skin of its teeth manages to pull off its concept and be a lot of fun, and that’s because it’s a comedy. If this had been presented without all the jokes, it would have been the sort of film I really dislike – trendy-trendy Tarrantino derivatives with the tired, deeply deeply lazy conceit of being about a screenwriter trying to write a film. I hate screenplays about screenwriters writing, possibly making allowances for Charlie Kaufmann doing it but in general finding it highly irritating – and it’s the centre of the plot here. Possibly I’d give the same leeway to Martin McDonagh if I’d seen In Bruges, but I didn’t catch it, so this was my first impression of him. The meta concept is supposed to give a sense of credence, much like books that pretend they’re written by the main character, but in film it only has a distancing effect.

Alcoholic Irish screenwriter Marty needs inspiration for his screenplay, Seven Psychopaths, as he just gets drunk all the time and rips off his friend Billy’s ideas. Billy is involved with a ridiculous scam led by an older Polish gentleman called Hans, in which the two of them kidnap dogs for a few days, answer the ads and collect the reward. To help Marty along, Billy puts an ad in the paper asking for psychopaths to get in touch to share their stories, and while that leads to a disturbing encounter, they have much bigger problems because one of the kidnapped dogs belongs to a mafia boss who wants it back at any costs.

The set-up isn’t terrible, but much of the early development is. It’s painfully obvious who the psychopath with the jack of diamonds calling card is, and it doesn’t make sense that he’s two of the titular seven. The line between comedy and drama is deftly toed everywhere but with the mafia guys, who are too cartoony. And honestly, it’s just not very interesting, with vague ideas about psychopaths thrown around and occasionally enacted – there’s one idea about a Vietnamese guy who’s going to take revenge for war atrocities, and another stolen from Billy about a quaker who stalks his daughter’s killer, which of course neatly gets referred to again later.

The film rests, though, on two brilliant asides and a strong ending that mixes anticlimax, dryness and traditional action payoffs very nicely. The first aside is with Tom Waits’ character Zachariah, who goes everywhere carrying a white rabbit, telling the story of himself and his lover travelling the country as serial killers who hunt down and kill serial killers. When Tom Waits’ character is too horrified by the burning to death of the Zodiac Killer, they part, and he’s been searching for her ever since. The time and place the character reappears can be seen coming a mile off, but it is still quite brilliant, Waits’ inimical voice relates the tale perfectly and his presence here is worth the price of admission alone.

The second aside is Billy’s concept of how the film should be, an incredibly stupid shoot-out in a graveyard full of melodrama and absurdity. What makes it work is that it’s all filmed, done with a great seriousness by the actors, with every stupid twist enacted and every ridiculously violent moment realized. It’s easily one of the funniest scenes in any film I’ve ever seen, and is all the better for the contrast with the understated, wry humour elsewhere.

At the end, the neat way the ends are tied up is very nice. I was cynical about the Vietnamese man’s story, and it really only works because of how it’s delivered, but it does work, in the end. Hans’ stand-off with the mobsters, where he undercuts their schtick with wonderful deadpan responses, couldn’t have worked better. Loved it.

And no review of this film could be complete without mention of its fantastic cast. This ensemble is absolutely sublime, and Tom Waits is really the icing on an exceedingly tasty cake. Colin Farrell does bewildered and hapless yet likeable far better than expected, and Christopher Walken brings such measured gravitas to what is after all a role that oscillates between awesome and pathetic, and embodies a man so very different from his usual characters sublimely. Sam Rockwell, who despite loving him in Moon and enjoying in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy I had hitherto paid little attention to, certainly distinguished himself this time, with a bravura performance balancing madness and goofy simplicity in a compelling, fascinating and rather unsettling way without ever being unbelievable – just the sort of role someone like him needs to stand out. And then there’s Woody Harrelson, whose character is simple on the surface but probably the hardest of any of them to make work in the film, being at once logical and precise, unhinged and unpredictable and also motivated by a rather daft love of his doggie. They all spark off each other, and it’s fascinating to watch it all work.

Arguably it shouldn’t work. It should annoy me. But largely thanks to the cast, it doesn’t. They are very enjoyable to watch.