The Other End of the Spectrum: “The Gentlemen”

After Ed Wood, it’s unlikely I’d find a more extreme polar opposite. Guy Ritchie is possessed of one of the most frenetic, technique-laden approaches to visual story-telling of any director around. Additionally, he commands casts that can breathe life into dialog that may be among some of the most florid in contemporary cinema.

That said, Wood and Ritchie do have a couple of things in common. Hear me out! Please, before you look into having me committed, consider the following.

Just because a camera is kinetic (or hyper-so), doesn’t mean that there is a compelling story being told. Just because the scripted language is colourful doesn’t mean that what’s being said is cogent or not nonsensical. And just because a film is shot in the twenty-first century, doesn’t mean that said film is free of casual racism or a tortured, convoluted plot.

That said, I enjoyed “The Gentlemen”; the performances carry this debacle through relatively briskly. The “relatively” comes from the flaws mentioned above. And this brings me to what for me, is a common conundrum. Can I enjoy a movie when the flaws seem so glaring? Surprisingly, yes.

I won’t defend those flaws, nor make excuses for enjoying the genuinely strong points, but I think it’s important to call out what the problems are in any work.

I should probably point out that I’m not a huge Ritchie fan. I barely recall “Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels” or “Snatch”, his first two features. Both were hailed as “Tarantinoesque”, but that had become a descriptor already for conversation-heavy scripts abounding with pop culture references and the use of a variety of camera techniques and precision editing to drive a story forward.

In my mind, by the time Ritchie showed up on the scene, most people had already accepted Tarantino’s influence. Some had taken the lessons learned and moved on in their own unique manners (Robert Rodriquez and Danny Boyle come to mind most quickly). Ritchie never quite got me on board; the dialog was appropriately funny and often delivered with aplomb, his visual choices more “Trainspotting” than “Reservoir Dogs”, but there’s a lack of a center in his characters, in his tales. Sure, there’s a plot and a concomitant goal to be met, but what I have in mind is that there isn’t the kind of substance you get from Quentin T.

I never get the feeling that Ritchie is burning to tell a tale. I have more the impression that he wants to pull out a bag of tricks and tell whatever story at hand in as clever way as possible. This works for concealing the sins of sloppy story-telling or flaccid/empty plots. But it also results in the kind of disposability of so much stuff we see over a lifetime.

The reason this kind of thing annoys me is that it’s often fun trash parading as “art”. I do like my trash (read this blog; I ain’t lyin’). I don’t like multimillion spectacles of laziness masquerading as accomplished narratives.

This isn’t to say that I think Guy Ritchie assumes he’s a major cinematic artist. He isn’t, and I’m pretty sure he knows that; and it doesn’t and shouldn’t prevent him for swinging for the bleachers, but there’s that annoyance factor of what happens when a director departs from what has become the familiar blockbuster work he's more popularly known for, makes a return to his “roots”, and it’s painfully obvious that he hasn’t moved forward.

If nothing else, I seem to recall that his first films had fairly economically told stories. In the ensuing decades, what should have been a similarly economically told story is chock-a-block full of bloat. It’s not just that it’s a mouthy script; it’s a shaggy dog tale that could have been shortened considerably. Christ, it could have been trimmed.

We’ve got Matthew McConaughey as an ex-pat American in London, multimillionaire pot baron who wants to get out of the business and begins to make a deal with Jeremy Strong as the other Yank ex-pat. But “there’s fuckery afoot” (as Michelle Dockery’s Rosalind puts it). As much as Matthew’s Mickey tries to keep everything below the radar, shit keeps blowing up in his face, or more precisely, in his consigliere’s face, Ray played by a game Charlie Hunnam. All of the proceedings are deliciously detailed by a Hugh Grant in a phenomenal turn as a private investigator who reminds us why P.I.s are also called dicks.

Henry Golding, in a heel turn from his role in “Crazy Rich Asians”, is a murderous little shit who seems to be subverting his uncle’s wishes and trying to cut into Matthew’s business. Both Henry’s Dry Eye and his uncle, Tom Wu in a thankless role as Lord George, a major mover of opiates are Asian gangsters, Chinese specifically, and while not choirboys, the recipients of the lion’s share of racist slurs.

They’re not alone. There’s a discussion about racism in another context; in a mixed martial arts gym run by Colin Farrell – who, along with Grant, has the best lines and delivers them with his customary brio – we find a white boxer referring to his black sparring partner as a “black cunt”. Farrell’s Coach explains that the lad didn’t mean it; it’s more a term of affection, etc., etc. One suspects Ritchie inserted this exchange to say, “see? I’m not racist!”

It also doesn’t help that, why, of course, Dry Eye also attempts to rape Rosalind (who’s tough as nails since she popped caps in the foreheads of Dry Eye’s henchmen). I say, “of course”, because this is another lazy trope that Ritchie couldn’t find an alternative for? It also comes out of left-field since Dry Eye is portrayed as ambitious and willing to kill and defile his uncle’s corpse, but honestly? As he’s played, there’s no indication that he’d pull a move like this. It’s a jarring scene that serves only to get the crowd to cheer (I guess) when Mickey shows up and blows him away. Pfffft.

Ritchie probably isn’t racist. And if pressed, I’m sure he might say that this is just the way these guys would talk. Fine. I get that, but unlike Tarantino’s free use of the N-word, the xenophobia doesn’t seem to fit and the bending over backwards to justify a racist slur points out that it’s not a well-thought-out choice. I may be making more of this than I need to, but none of this feels as organic or as earned as in, say, a Tarantino script.

I’m also not sure if Ritchie is homophobic or not, but Fletcher reads like a gay horn dog of the basest urges and Jeremy Strong’s Matthew is coded as gay but in a mincing if sometimes menacing, manner. Thankfully, no one calls them “puffs”, but there’s a shitty trope that’s been used in altogether too many movies of homosexuality being layered into deviant/murderous/rapacious behaviour as if the one is a natural extension of the other.

The plot is too labyrinthine to recap, but suffice it so say that the sale is jeopardized by Dry Eye but not in the way we’re led to believe earlier in the film; it turns out he’s working hand in glove with Matthew (Jeremy Strong, not McConaughey) to drive the price down of Mickey’s assets and in the meantime, via a series of mishaps, the Russian mob is involved at the climax, to the degree that Farrell’s street kids turned MMA fighters actually rather save the day. At the end, Mickey gets his money and a pound of flesh out of Matthew, and Hugh Grant’s Fletcher meets a reckoning at Ray’s hands (we assume; after Fletcher tries to pitch his story to Miramax in London, he gets in a car only to find that Ray is driving.)

I said I enjoyed the movie. I did. I enjoyed some great fun performances, particularly Grant’s and Farrell’s, but I thought Dockery and McConaughey were fab and should do more together. I actually liked their characters and if Ritchie could reign in some of his sloppier tendencies, I could see the further adventures of Mickey and Rosalind.

I suppose I may be asking too much of what is essentially glittery popcorn material; but if Ritchie is attempting to go back to the well that established his reputation (which took several hits in quick succession; “Swept Away” with Madonna, anyone? “Revolution”? “Rocknrolla”? Ugh…), it would be heartening to see him leave his blockbuster bluster aside, slow down, and write something less shaggy.