And that, there, is why I fell in love with this film. The rough language that has a rhythm and groove, and feels like it's falling out of the minds of Farrell and Gleeson and Fiennes in unfiltered stanzas. It's Mamet with a lilt (especially in Farrell's hands). It's a comic flow that when these three ace actors toss in their syncopated pauses it maximizes the laugh factor exponentially. Sentences build and explode in beated punch-lines that flow naturally from the material. It's coarse and brutal, but behind the words are human feelings of desperate men. Ray is badly shaken up by the death of that child. It haunts him, keeps him awake at night and makes him fear for his soul. He drinks to deaden the pain. Ken, the veteran, has been at it awhile, owing a debt to Harry Waters from the past and is loyal to a fault. And Harry is a vicious gangster who loves his family and lives unswervingly by a precise code of honor. These are bad men with silver linings of virtue tucked away where no one can hurt them. In their own ways, they are romantics. Homicidal romantics, maybe. But, then, that's the work.
Steeped in quirky characters, and nearly prat-falling over itself with implied comedy, In Bruges manages to do something unique in the post-Tarantino action revolution of stylization, and pervasive...everything—it manages to have soul, a caring one, at that, where actions have consequences that don't get lost in the final reel amidst the carnage and wise-cracks.
"Drop the gun...or else...I shoot." |
* And, as in the film Once, there is something about the word spoken with an Irish accent that makes it less harsh and far more charming, like the name of a seaside Gaelic town.
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