Oh, the Irish and their love of words. The lilting rhythms of Yeats, the biting satire of Shaw, the heady impenetrability of Joyce. And then there’s the London-born, but Irish-derived McDonagh brothers, Martin and John Michael, and their great love for the many uses of the word “fuck”.
Younger brother Martin is the more famous of the two, a superstar of the theatre world whose violent visions and profane proclivities have engendered comparisons to a stage-bound Tarantino, and who made the transition to feature films with 2008’s often underrated buddy-hitmen flick, In Bruges. John Michael’s CV is considerably shorter, having penned the 2003 Aussie outlaw biopic Ned Kelly, and now making his debut as writer-director with The Guard, which is firmly in the family tradition of darkly witty, violent crime pieces with a sharp comic edge.
The film stars Brendan Gleeson (who also starred in Bruges) as Sergeant Gerry Boyle, a middle aged garda — the Irish name for officers in the national police force of Ireland — patrolling the largely quiet beat of the Connemara, a windswept district on the west coast of the island, not far from Galway. The film opens with him calmly watching a group of teens speed by and, when they get into an accident, calmly raiding the bodies for drugs. Not for evidence, mind you: occasionally getting high on a criminal’s stash, or ordering up a pair of prostitutes on his day off is just a break in the monotony for Boyle, making him something like a more jovial, less depraved version of Harvey Keitel’s Bad Lieutenant.
The relative boredom of this quiet area makes the crime the he and an over-eager young officer encounter the next day even more surprising: a young man is found with a bullett in his head, and the number 5 1/2 written on the wall in his blood. The young cop, who’s seen two many crime films, floats the idea that perhaps it’s a serial killer who didn’t entirely kill one of his victims. As it turns out, though, it’s potentially related to another crime wave hitting the area: the FBI has caught wind of a massive drug ring attempting to ship drugs through the area, and has sent agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle) over to coordinate the investigation with the locals.
McDonagh takes a page from the Coen brothers playbook, poking some fun at the provincial locals, but really using them to take the interloping outsider down a peg. In this case that’s Cheadle, who is stymied in his investigation by a population who either ignore him outright, or refuse to speak the same language. “Go to England if you want to speak English,” one local sneers at him in Gaelic. Reluctantly, he’s forced to accept the assistance of Boyle, an unorthodox cop who puts Everett off balance with racist statements that he doesn’t really mean — “I’m Irish! Racism is part of my culture,” he explains — that are even more confusing when the agent realize that Boyle seems to be the only guard who knows what he’s doing.
While the film treads close to caricature at times, with standard-issue country cop vs. city cop conflicts, and a trio of self-consciously quirky baddies led by black-hat actor of the moment Mark Strong (he played the villain in Sherlock Holmes and the villain-in-waiting in Green Lantern), McDonagh’s wildly inventive writing compensates for any boilerplate aspects in the plot. He’s prone to sending his characters on odd conversational tangents — which puts him in the company of Tarantino as well, but McDonagh’s tendency is more towards the overtly comic, and his black and deadpan sense of humor is The Guard‘s second biggest selling point.
The best thing the movie has going, though, is Gleeson. His performance highlights the fact that this is a fully formed character, even if Boyle initially seems built from stock parts. He’s a highly skilled and hugely intelligent cop who buries those aspects of his personality, perhaps to keep himself in the quiet life of Connemara. But the troubles are gaining on him, as he deals with a mother dying of cancer (Fionnula Flanagan, matching Gleeson’s sarcasm note for note), and the crime and police corruption rising to a point that he can no longer ignore. Gleeson’s depiction of the conflict between Boyle’s desire to be left alone, and his innate sense of justice, is the perfectly nuanced quiet complement to McDonagh’s clever words.
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The Guard
Written and Directed John Michael McDonagh
Starring Brendan Gleeson, Don Cheadle, Liam Cunningham, Mark Strong
Running time: 96 minutes
Rated R for pervasive language, some violence, drug material, and sexual content.
Opens today at E Street, Bethesda Row, Shirlington, and Cinema Arts.
