by Bennett Campbell Ferguson
Above: Ryan Gosling with Refn
If like me, you go to view “Only
God Forgives” in the hope once again being hypnotized by Ryan Gosling’s silent presence,
you will be disappointed. While Mr.
Gosling does play Julian, the film’s criminal protagonist, writer-director
Nicolas Winding Refn is far more interested in the character of Chang. Why? I’m
not exactly sure. Chang (played by
Vithaya Pansringarm) is hardly a complex figure. Though he is technically a Bangkok police
officer, his brand of justice is thuggish.
He walks smoothly and carries a sword, which is frequently used to kill
and torture his victims and that, more or less, is what the film is about—a man
dispensing cruel justice.
If
watching that sounds like your idea of a good time, be my guest. But I found “Only God Forgives” to be
sickening, pointless, and surprisingly boring.
To be sure, this is an unexpected disappointment—after all, it was only
a year and a half ago that Mr. Refn and Mr. Gosling first united to make the
stunningly beautiful film “Drive.” But
even though motifs from that film resurface in the new one to good effect, they
can’t save it from degenerating into a stupidly nasty exercise.
Thankfully,
the film has the flicker of a moral conscience.
Julian, though prone to violent outbursts, has some sense of right and
wrong. When his brother Billy is
murdered, our “hero” sets out to find and kill the man responsible. But when he learns the reason behind his
brother’s murder, Julian spares the murderer’s life. This provokes Julian’s mother Crystal (Kristin
Scott Thomas) to take up the quest to avenge Billy herself, setting in motion a
series of horrific events that will leave much of the cast dead by the time the
credits roll.
In
some ways, the presence of Crystal feels intrusive. With her dyed blonde hair and crude
observations about her son’s anatomy, she enters this shadowy film like a
bright and gaudy light. But that’s par for
Refn, who allowed the romantic scenes of “Drive” to be interrupted by Albert
Brooks’ performance as a crass gangster.
“Only God Forgives” features a similar balance—when Crystal is off-screen,
the film lapses into silence and we’re allowed to gaze into Mr. Gosling’s eyes
and wonder just what he might be thinking.
The silence is especially evocative in a scene where Julian stares at a
prostitute who’s cloaked behind a curtain of glowing red beads. A few times he gets up and approaches her,
but then the film abruptly cuts back to a shot of him sitting slumped in his
booth. So is he dreaming about walking
up to this woman or actually doing it? I
didn’t know while watching the scene and I didn’t care—the moment is so quietly
surreal that it manages to evoke a strange longing that you want to last
forever.
Ultimately,
it’s hard to read Julian. But I would
guess that Mr. Refn and Mr. Gosling intended him to be a fairly decent person
who resists and then feels obliged to help his mother in her quest for
revenge. That’s why he challenges Chang
to a fight, which takes place in a massive, featureless warehouse. I thought it was a fine fight, made potent by
the fact that Julian seems so helpless against Chang’s calm strength, but by
then the movie had almost completely lost me.
Had Mr. Refn delved deeper into Julian’s character, he might have been
able to instill the film with some emotional weight. But instead he focuses on Chang’s cruelty,
which is awful to behold but also dully repetitive. In one scene for example, Chang proceeds to
interrogate a man through the use of various sharp objects. It’s a pattern—he picks up one, uses it, asks
a question, doesn’t get an answer, then picks up another one. It’s so gross and boring that I found myself
wincing and groaning at the same time.
In the
hours since I left the screening of “Only God Forgives” which I attended, those
horrible images have stayed with me. But
so has the sneaking suspicion that maybe Mr. Refn never intended the film to be
enjoyable. If nothing else the man is
ambitious, so it seems feasible that he wanted to create some kind of avant
garde meditation on the nature of violence.
But shouldn’t art offer some pleasure?
I think so. In terms of excusing
the lesser works of great filmmakers, we have to draw the line somewhere.
Of
course if you care about Mr. Refn’s work, then you probably feel obligated to
see his latest work. But what made “Drive”
such a wonderful movie was that it became a beautifully tragic love story, of a
man who falls for and loses the girl of his dreams when he resorts to violence
to protect her. There is something
beautiful about that sacrifice and Mr. Refn seems to have forgotten that beauty
in film can be a wonderful thing because in “Only God Forgives,” there is no
sweetness—there is only death and cruelty.
“I fucked up,” Crystal tells Julian near the film’s end when she sees
him covered in blood after his battle with Chang. But by then it is too late for apologies, or
even, dare I say it, forgiveness.
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