In Irish playwright John Michael McDonagh’s
darkly funny, profane and oddly melancholy freshman film The Guard –
with its circus side show cast of gun toting little boys, shy gay cops, cell
phone picture taking rent girls, suicidal moms, to the manor born African
American FBI agents, Nietzsche quoting drug traffickers and frisky young crime
scene photographers -- a depressed rural policeman (called a guard in the local
slang) sits in a kind of stupor in his squad car as life in Western Ireland
near Galway literally passes by at warp speed. Sergeant Gerry Boyle (Brendan
Gleeson) is awoken from his nap by the sound of three drunken local lads
turning into crash test dummies. Checking the corpse of the driver for drugs –
“I don’t think your mommy would be too pleased about that, now” – Boyle slips a
tab of acid on his tongue and exclaims, “What a beautiful fucking day!”
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Brendan Gleeson – Harry Potter’s grouchy
Professor Mad-Eye Moody – has racked up an impressive number of star character
turns for filmmakers as different in their predilections as mad Mel Gibson (Braveheart)
and John Michael McDonagh’s twin playwright brother Martin (In Bruges).
In the profanity spewing, authority tweaking Sergeant Gerry Boyle Gleeson sinks
his teeth into a role that is on the surface a winking tour de force of bluster
and blarney, masking the mid-life sorrow of a lonely man who sees his closeted
junior partner assassinated by a vicious drug gang while his equally depressed
cancer afflicted mum chooses death by pills. Just when he needs one the most
Boyle gets his perfect foil in a slightly prissy African American FBI agent,
Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle). Deliberately provoking the black cop with a
blizzard of racially insensitive jokes and cultural malapropisms, Boyle makes
himself useful to agent Everett by bluntly pointing out where the bodies are
buried, a job shunned by his police colleagues who are virtually all on payroll
of the drug runners – typical of McDonagh’s writing one of the sauciest scenes
features two crooked cops picking up their swag from a wickedly sarcastic
British hoodlum (Mark Strong).
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Boyle displays his battered
sensitive soul only to women. In a deliciously underplayed scene between two
souls in mourning Boyle talks to the Croatian widow of his young gay partner (Rory
Keenan), whose squad car was discovered abandoned near a desolate spot known to
the locals as a site where people take their lives. Filmmaker McDonagh gives
Gleeson and Katrina Cas, as the widow McBride, a subtext rich chat
spanning the dilemmas of Irish bachelors, immigrant visa
seeking foreign brides and
discreet homosexuals looking for their place in a still
deeply conservative society.
“I can’t think of anybody who would
have wanted to do something bad to Aldan.”
“He’s a guard. Somebody somewhere
probably had a grudge against him. It’s a better theory than suicide. Is there
anything you can tell me, anything personal?”
“He’s gay – you know when one man
puts his…”
“I’m familiar with the mechanics of
it, yeah. I just didn’t realize…”
“Do you think he might have met
someone there who might have done something bad to him?”
“Like a rent boy?”
“Yeah.”
“There’s not much call for rent
boys around here, as far as I know anyways. Why did you marry him? For the visa
I suppose. It’s just between you and me.”
(She whispers) “Yes, I get a visa and he looks…”
“Respectable.”
“Yes, respectable.”
Set in a backward looking if
awesomely beautiful swath of West Ireland where significant segments of the
population speak only Gaelic (and many refuse to speak to a black cop), The
Guard balances rude talk with hilariously dodgy characters climaxing in a
surprisingly volatile third act shootout to produce a homegrown wild West Irish
sequel to the Coen Brothers’ “Minnesota nice” bloodbath, Fargo.
In a device borrowed from the
theatre McDonagh provides curtain calls for his mostly unknown Irish cast --
starting off with the scene stealing, insolent Michael Og Lane (Og is Gaelic
for junior) as an impudent mini bike riding Protestant lad who leads Boyle to a
secret cache of IRA guns, schooling him in the subtleties of Lincoln assassin
John Wilkes Booth’s favorite weapon and Liam Cunningham as bullying Irish drug
kingpin Francis Sheehy Skeffington – it’s worth the price of a ticket just to
hear Gleeson pronounce this gloriously syllable laden moniker.
McDonagh’s strong suit as a first
time director is not surprisingly the kind of mordantly funny dialogue that won
him and brother Martin kudos from theatre goers enamored of bitter Gaelic humor
liberally laced with Anglo Saxon cuss
words. McDonagh also reveals a classic Anglo Irish taste for
pop ballads whose sugary flavor he dilutes with his acid wit: a Dublin accented
mobster bares his pop soul in a sweet shop scene underscored by Bobby Gentry’s Ode
To Billy Joel.
John Michael McDonagh drops by to
discuss his witty police comedy’s loose ends such as why a gay cop and the
background to his IRA chief’s quip that “we had to have gay guys to infiltrate
(the British spy agency) MI 5.”
“It goes back to the MI 5 (spying
for the Soviet Union) traitors Burgess, McClain and Philby, I think two of them
were gay, it’s an easy gag.
“The earlier one with the
policeman, who we find out is gay, it doesn’t really have anything to do with
the plot, but I needed a reason why his wife – when he goes missing she thinks
that it might not be foul play, it might be some other reason that he’s left
without telling her – and I didn’t want it to be, ‘Oh, he’s run off with
another woman,’ because that’s too clichéd, so I thought he’s gay, so she
might think he has some other relationship. But I also wanted it to be a moment
where Boyle realizes that he’s sort of judged a person as a cipher and not in
his full complexity.”
Lamble: He saves his tender side for the woman: his
tarts, his mom and his partner’s wife.
McDonagh: All the tender, empathetic scenes he has
are with women, especially with his mother, but even with the prostitutes it’s
not done in a sleazy way.
Originally the subplot with Katrina
Cas was going to be romantic but as we were shooting we thought it’s more
melancholic than this. She’s sort of the wife he wished he’d had, like the
little kid running through the movie, the child he might wished he had had.
It’s the parallel life which leads him on to the ambiguous ending.
Lamble: Boyle seems quite rude but he’s actually
expressing his bitter disappointment at his own life.
McDonagh: Boyle likes to undermine people who think
they have power over him – here’s this American guy coming in and ordering
everybody around. And there’s that British and Irish comedy idea about saying
the worse things you can say to needle somebody – you don’t actually believe
what you’re saying – Boyle isn’t a racist, but he’s saying the worst things he
can think of to, as we say in England, put Everett on the back foot, so he’s
not sure how to treat this supposed partner.