19/10/2012 - Seven Psychopaths is exhilarating and engaging cinema

British born Irish heritage writer/director Martin McDonagh came to notice by winning the Best Short Film, Live Action Oscar for Six Shooter. In Bruges [+see also:
trailer
film profile], his feature debut, won him much acclaim, but with Seven Psychopaths [+see also:
trailer
film profile], that had its UK Premiere at the 56th London Film Festival (and releasing in the UK and Ireland on December 7), McDonagh has really arrived on the world stage, all guns blazing, literally and metaphorically. The film’s genre has been sometimes disparagingly referred to as sub-Tarantino but to slot it there would be a disservice. Seven Psychopaths does have a plot filled with quirky characters, cool dialogue and extreme violence but the superficial similarities end there.

Marty (Colin Farrell) is a blocked, alcoholic Irish screenwriter in Los Angeles with just a title – Seven Psychopaths – and no plot for his next screenplay. He falls in with a pair of dognappers Billy (Sam Rockwell) and Hans (Christopher Walken) and gets stuck in the middle when they abduct local gangster Charlie’s (Woody Harrelson) beloved Shih Tzu, Bonny. Amid a hail of bullets the trio head out into the desert, Bonny in tow, with Charlie soon to be in pursuit, all the while improvising on Marty’s script.

Seven Psychopaths is that rarity – a smart, inventive script that uses genre standards like film within a film, machismo and road trips and turns them on their heads. The dialogue is salty and irreverent and is an equal opportunities offender with McDonagh lampooning the French, the English and the Irish in equal measure, amongst a host of other targets, delivering belly laughs as a result. The film also wears its misogynistic heart on its sleeve. When Hans responds to a draft of Marty’s script with the comment that there are hardly any women in it, and those who are die violent deaths, Marty’s response is that it’s a cruel world out there for women. As to be expected the humour is mostly dark. What sets the film apart from the sub-Tarantino genre is that it has a tender, beating heart as exemplified by the affectionate treatment of animals and the character of Hans’s wife Myra (Linda Bright Clay), a cancer patient. That said, every time McDonagh establishes a humane moment, he shatters it with swift, brutal violence, not unlike Takeshi Kitano in Hana-Bi. Performances are uniformly top drawer. Unexpectedly, Farrell plays the straight man to Rockwell and Walken and they walk away with the best lines though they are guilty of some gurning. And there are plenty of cameos from a gallery of craggy veterans including Tom Waits and Harry Dean Stanton. On the face of it, Seven Psychopaths can be enjoyed as a farce but scratch the surface and it is also a meditation on the nature of friendship and loyalty.

Seven Psychopaths is a UK/US coproduction between CBS Films and Film4 with support from the British Film Institute.