After gushing a bit about Brendan Gleeson, JMF recommended that I watch The Guard. And so I did. It is an amusing and interesting film, written and directed by John Michael McDonagh. It is hard not to compare the film to the work of his brother, Martin McDonagh. And it makes me wonder if I hadn’t read too much into In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths. Because despite all of its charm and intelligence, The Guard is something of a muddle.

The film tells the story of Gerry Boyle (Gleeson), a police officer in Ireland who is difficult in that way that the Irish can be. He’s always funny and honest and offensive, but inside beats the heart of a romantic hero. When a major cocaine deal is going to go down in the area, he’s the one guard who isn’t paid off because he’s thought to be too unpredictable. Meanwhile, FBI agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle) has come to the area in search of the drug dealers. Everett is probably a good portrait of how the Irish see Americans. He’s smart and committed and even maybe heroic. But he’s also something of a stuffed shirt with no sense of humor.

In the hands of Hollywood, this film would take a very tired course. Think The Heat. (See my review, Thematic Problems in The Heat.) Here, the film is mostly a character sketch. It wanders around without much point until an event at end of the second act that pushes Boyle into action. And the third act is then very much a Spaghetti Western parody, but more A Fistful of Dynamite than A Fistful of Dollars.

The first two acts remind me rather a lot of Bill Forsyth, who is essentially a character driven storyteller. McDonagh adds to that a genre element that both provides dramatic momentum and more thematic depth. But I don’t think it fully works here. Because ultimately, the film gets too involved in its plot and it never resolves what exactly it is trying to say about Boyle. To me, the character is a lost soul. So the heroic denouement seems forced. Comic book characters go from lost to hero; real characters go from lost to less lost.

Another problem is that Everett isn’t a very effective character. He seems to have been thrown into the narrative for the purpose of making the third act work. There is only one sequence until the end where he is not paired with Boyle. And although it is amusing, it sticks out as a distracting subplot. Most of the lesser characters have far more to them. Everett is almost entirely functional.

The film is at its best when Boyle and Everett are at each other. Boyle is never so funny as when he’s winding up Everett. And Everett’s mystified reactions to Boyle are some of the best things in the film. Because of this, it is quite an enjoyable experience. And the ending is playful meta fun. But under the surface, there isn’t much to get. And I think McDonagh means for there to be. I will be keen to see what he offers up in the future.

Afterword

I hate ratings like “Four Stars!” But I can see their uses. When I write things like this, most people will think that I didn’t like this film, even though I very clearly say that I did like it. But because I focused on the problems in the film, many people will get the idea that I didn’t. That gets to the problem with ratings. How do you rate a film that works but has problems. And what does it really matter if I like a film? I try to give an idea of what a film is about and if it works. Taste is, well, taste. So unless its Netflix, which combines my simplistic ratings with what other people who tend to like the kind of films I like, what is the point?