Gunsels Abroad: Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges

David Begelman

            The Irish playwright Martin McDonagh is a real mixer. He consistently combines two themes in his dramas, ones kept apart by most of his contemporaries: humor and sadism. His stage works, from The Beauty Queen of Leeane to The Pillowman, mark him as the playwright of the unpleasant—correction—horrific. What other description can there be for scenarios involving torture, the crucifixion of children, dismemberment, or the unnerving opening of The Lieutenant of Inishmaan, where the curtain goes up on a cat’s intestines spilling out over a table?

            In Bruges is McDonagh’s directorial debut for a full-length film. (A prior effort, Six Shooter, was a shorter piece.) He also authored its screenplay. Questions about his penchant for black comedy throughout his literary career are no brainers, although he walks a perilous tightrope between the comedic and the gruesome he bundles along with it. You’ve somehow got to get past the ghastly things he dishes up in order to start laughing, and the extent to which McDonagh accomplishes the impossible task is, I suppose, some measure of his literary talent. This reviewer considered The Pillowman the outstanding Broadway hit of the 2005 season. It is nonetheless a Kafkaesque tale of the interrogation and torture of two brothers by a pair of secret police officials in a nameless totalitarian state.

            The number two seems to be of some significance to McDonagh, and In Bruges is no exception. Its hit men afoot in Belgium, Ken and Ray (played fetchingly by Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell), are a twosome, as are Tupolski and Ariel, and the two brothers, Katurian and Michal, in The Pillowman. There are two brothers, Ralph and Pato in The Beauty Queen of Leeane; the two Connor brothers, Valene and Coleman, in The Lonesome West; the incompetent sibs, Davey and Donny, in The Lieutenant of Inishmaan; and finally, the pair of squabbling brothers in A Skull in Connemara.

            Of course, contract killer twosomes are nothing new. Absenting the Elizabethan scene (notably Richard III), Ernest Hemingway blazed a trail with menacing Al and Max, the murderous pair who invade a diner in his taut 1927 short story The Killers. (It was subsequently transformed into a screenplay meandering far afoot from the writer’s original tale). Quentin Tarantino in Pulp Fiction gave us an inimitable pair of hired killers (played by John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson) whose deadly business was laced with a repartee that was a paean to churlishness, religiosity, and—to top it off—monumentally inconsequential patter.

McDonagh’s two hit men are a cut apart. They are ordered by their boss, Harry (played with tight-lipped fury and a fondness for the f-word by the capable Ralph Fiennes), to keep a low profile on their whereabouts after a messy hit. Dutifully, they repair to the Belgian town of historical importance and great beauty. Like Amsterdam, Bruges is a city of canals.

Ken has a different reaction to the place than does Ray, whose inability to adjust takes the form of impatience and agitation: “If I grew up on a farm and was retarded, Bruges might impress me.” His considered judgment is that Bruges “is a shit hole,” a verdict the harshness of which gets tempered by his meeting a comely Belgian girl, Chloe (played seductively by Clemence Poesy), who responds favorably to the brash, albeit callow, young Irishman. Ray gets caught up in a round of coke snorting with his new girlfriend, not to mention escapades of violence with a skinhead, a dwarf (whom he fells with a karate blow), and a man in a restaurant who rubs him the wrong way. For Ray, Bruges after a time understandably gets to feel a bit like home.

Ken, on the other hand, immerses himself in the town, one he finds attractive from the cultural standpoint. He visits churches, particularly those housing the great Flemish painters including Hieronymous Bosch, whose depictions of the damned touch a nerve in both killers. All the same, the cultural past fails to impress Ray: “History’s a bunch of stuff that’s already up” he quips.

            Both killers, we are quick to discover, have their mushy sides. It makes us wonder how long they could persevere in a profession that brooks little in the way of misgivings born of sentimentality, and the answer is not long in coming in the film. Ray in particular experiences continuing guilt over his accidental shooting of a child while he was dispatching a priest during a contract killing: “He’s dead because of me. Trying to get my head around it, but I can’t. It’ll never go away.” 

            There is obviously more to these two killers than meets the eye, and in the film’s  denouement how much they really mean to each other is made amply clear. Unfortunately, ending sequences are charged with a round robin of bloodletting, catapulting what was genuinely appealing about the first part of the film right over the edge of plausibility. McDonagh won’t be the first to falter over knowing how to end a film. Not quitting when one is ahead seems to be a vice not restricted to heavyweight boxers.

            The acting of all the principals is uniformly accomplished. Brendan Gleeson is clearly the most impressive in his role as Ken, and Colin Farrell as Ray turns in a performance that more than redeems his work in piffles like Alexander and Daredevil. Carter Burwell has graced the film with a fine score of piano and vocal music, while Eigil Bryld’s cinematography includes breathtaking shots of the Belgian City, its church edifices, canals, and monuments.