Seven Psychopaths

SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS (Martin McDonagh, 2012)

In SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS screenwriter Marty Faranan (Colin Farrell) is struggling to come up with a script for a film of the same name.  His creative block might be related to the alcoholism that his friend Billy Bickle (Sam Rockwell) suggests he has.  Then again, Billy can’t exactly be trusted completely.  The temperamental aspiring actor is hellbent on finding some way to collaborate with Marty on the screenplay.  While Billy is a good friend, he doesn’t make the wisest choices.

For instance, Billy is involved in a dog abduction scheme with Hans (Christopher Walken).  Billy takes the adored pets, and Hans returns them to the grateful owners for the reward money.  It looks to be an easy and risk-free method of lining their pockets until they take the beloved Shih Tzu of organized crime boss Charlie (Woody Harrelson). He doesn’t take kindly to news of his dog’s disappearance.  Charlie and his men don’t have to search long before they are chasing Billy, Hans, and a guilty-by-association Marty.
 
As a mash-up of ADAPTATION and ‘90s Tarantino-inspired films, SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS is either too clever by half or not clever enough to fulfill all of its ambitions.  Like Charlie Kaufman, writer-director Martin McDonagh loads the film over capacity with ideas and structural complexities.  McDonagh zigzags plenty, sometimes to the film’s detriment, but he provides plenty to chew on among the ample laughs and bloodshed.  

On one level the existential comedy is about the process of filmmaking.  On another it’s concerned with what makes a man a man and the social expectations of how machismo is expressed.  Ultimately SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS is most interested in exploring the need for dreams, be they reflected in the movies or offered through religious promises about an afterlife.  Is what we do in our lives meaningless or the basis for the potential earning of some greater reward?  Are we even in control of writing our own life scripts, or is another screenwriter--the Almighty Creator, in fact--determining how the narrative develops?

SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS doesn’t knuckle down and decide how to answer everything tossed out for consideration--how could it?--but even when it feels like little more than intellectual, postmodern spitballing, it satisfies as an exercise in storytelling.  It helps that McDonagh employs a who’s who of character actors to flesh out a rogue’s gallery worthy of living up to the film’s title.  As a foil to Farrell’s straight man, Rockwell is amusingly unhinged as a wild card of a friend.  Walken brings gravitas and soul to an eccentric man who knows all too well the tension between faith and despair in the face of the seemingly random.  Harrelson is a fearsome and humorous study in the film’s clash between violent and loving impulses.  Tom Waits and Harry Dean Stanton are plugged into the lineup for good measure.  SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS doesn’t reach the high bar McDonagh sets for it, yet he distributes a good number of pleasures with the film’s wit, contemplative offerings, and unpredictable nature.  

Grade: B

Conviction

CONVICTION (Tony Goldwyn, 2010)

Hilary Swank has gravitated to roles in which her character has a singular purpose and is vigilant in staying on course. In the fact-based CONVICTION she’s found another determined woman to add to her roster. Swank plays Betty Anne Waters, a high school dropout who makes it through a rough upbringing with her brother Kenny (Sam Rockwell).

Kenny has his share of encounters with the Ayers, Massachusetts police, but things get serious in 1980 when he’s brought in for questioning about a local murder. Three years later he is convicted of the crime despite his protestations of innocence. Betty Anne believes her brother and vows to get all of the necessary education to prove that he didn’t do it, no matter how long it takes.

CONVICTION’S title refers more to the dedication of Betty Anne Waters than the judgment rendered against Kenny. The film isn’t anything fancy and doesn’t contain much in the way of surprises, but it wields an enormous amount of power in depicting the bottomless love and devotion that a sister has for her brother. After Kenny was convicted Betty Anne earned her GED, Bachelor’s, Master’s, and law degrees and located the key evidence presumed to have been destroyed years earlier. All in all, it took around twenty years for her persistence to pay off.

Swank plays the role with a quiet intensity that beautifully conveys the selflessness and personal cost that such an endeavor must require. Director Tony Goldwyn and screenwriter Pamela Gray don’t shy from showing the toll Betty Anne’s decisions have on her life, but like Swank, they don’t oversell the sacrifices or thickly apply sentimentality.

This unassuming film features a moving story that’s well-told and well-performed. Instead of concerning itself with slick legal maneuvers and courtroom grandstanding, CONVICTION is unashamedly straightforward in showing how a lot of hard work and sheer willpower was able to correct an injustice.

Grade: B

Snow Angels

SNOW ANGELS (David Gordon Green, 2007)

Two nearby pops of a shotgun interrupt band practice in a small town in SNOW ANGELS. The echoing blasts don't signify hunting season but the tragic consequences of broken hearts and shattered illusions.

Interweaving stories of burgeoning and disintegrating love, SNOW ANGELS follows three couples in uncertain relationships. The most damaged one exists between Annie (Kate Beckinsale) and Glenn Marchand (Sam Rockwell). The longtime sweethearts are separated and do not appear to have a chance of reconciling their marriage. Glenn attempted to kill himself after Annie first rejected him. Now he's giving born-again Christianity and newfound but weak sobriety a whirl in hopes of repairing the rift.

Glenn aims to be a better man for his wife and daughter, but his new job and outlook on life don't seem to be making much of an impression on Annie. She has found comfort in the arms of Nate Petite (Nicky Katt), the husband of Barb (Amy Sedaris), a friend and co-worker at the Chinese restaurant. The more Glenn's efforts are ignored, the more he backslides.

High school trombone player Arthur Parkinson (Michael Angarano) works alongside Annie at the Chinese place. He once harbored a crush on his former babysitter, but as an observer of her marital difficulties, she has lost much of her fantasy mystique. With his parents (Griffin Dunne and Jeanetta Arnette) freshly split, Arthur is discovering that love is more complicated than it might seem. While he is cautious around Lila Raybern (Olivia Thirlby), a quirky new girl who takes an immediate shine to him, Arthur finds that he can't help but fall for her.

Although SNOW ANGELS has some of the trappings of a suburban hell film--think AMERICAN BEAUTY and LITTLE CHILDREN--writer-director David Gordon Green embraces the characters in his rurally located movie rather than keeping them at arm's length with snarkiness and irony. Viewing these often unlikeable people with empathy, and sometimes humor, instead of judgment and condescension makes all the difference in what could have otherwise been a miserabilist tour of a rocky relationship landscape.

The opening scene, in which the band director takes his young charges to task for a sloppy rendition of Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer", explicitly lays out Green's opinion of the damaged souls we will come to know: every person matters. At first glance the moment plays as a comedic remembrance of too-serious instructors making impassioned pleas to jaded students, but by the end it becomes obvious that this is the director's way of asking the audience to respect the humanity of characters who may be beyond the understanding of most viewers.

Clearly, the character Green has most in mind is Glenn. Rockwell's high wire act of a performance teeters from humorous to harrowing. The charm that Glenn once exhibited has given way to desperation that, while with its funny qualities, can be all too frightening. Glenn tends to be quick to abuse himself to show seriousness and penance. The trait can produce comic effects until it becomes apparent that he's near another breaking point.

Rockwell puts on a friendly face and acts like a man who is trying to get his life together, but in reality this is a rickety facade Glenn has tacked up to cover the truth that he's working frantically not to fall apart. His nervous body language, forced smiles, and blindly upbeat talk reveal him as the emotionally fragile man he wants to hide. Glenn makes others uneasy, yet Rockwell's jittery performance and Green's devotion to telling his story humanize him in spite of it.

The darkness of the Glenn and Annie thread in SNOW ANGELS is lightened with Arthur and Lila's tender and tentative romance, although the separated couple's carefree high school days linger in the distant horizon too. As he demonstrated in the excellent ALL THE REAL GIRLS, Green has a knack for articulating what his characters can't, especially when it comes to love. With Angarano and Thirlby gracefully conveying awkwardness, Arthur and Lila fumble their way into a sweet, realistic relationship in which sharing one's artistic photographs is a better indicator of trust and affection than mere words.

Likewise, Green often prefers longtime cinematographer Tim Orr's poetic images to tell as much of the story as possible over the dialogue. SNOW ANGELS may be the director's most plot-driven film, but it's still very much a mood piece that establishes place with an unerring eye and ear.

Whereas many filmmakers condescend in presenting working class people and their environment--either through sentimentalized small town fantasies or the outsider's pitiable view--Green respects the stolid folk and rugged beauty, both natural and man-made, by showing everyone and everything for what they are instead of putting them in scare quotes. The impassive people behave in familiar manners, and home interiors dressed with quilts and country knickknacks feel lived in. It's a major part of driving home Green's insistence to value these characters.

In retracing the steps that led to the opening shots fired, Green's adaptation of Stewart O'Nan's novel provides the context rarely found in news reports or fictional films about common tragedies. SNOW ANGELS can painfully burrow into one's heart, but such is the cost of empathy, or any human connection for that matter.

Grade: B+

(For more on SNOW ANGELS and the director, read my interview with David Gordon Green.)