The Guard

John Michael McDonagh’s The Guard (2011)is a buddy-cop picture set in Connemara, in the west of Ireland. The film is a minor genre-piece but likeably throughout, featuring highly effective performances by various Irish actors. Brendan Gleeson plays a doughy, corrupt Irish cop who is so contrary, and ornery, that he becomes an avenging hero against his own better impulses. Gleeson’s character is a rebel and, ultimately, he follows the logic of his cantankerous rebellion to its ultimate extreme, rebelling against his own indolent and hedonistic impulses to avenge the death of his partner and foil a standard-issue crime plot involving smuggling cocaine. Gleeson is pitted against Don Cheadle, an African-American FBI agent somewhat improbably paired with Gleeson’s fat and crooked cop. Cheadle’s role is underwritten and he doesn’t have much to do but look outraged, but he is a good foil for Gleeson’s exuberant performance and underacts so as to better emphasize the Irishman’s extravagant and whimsical misbehavior. The formula for this kind of film was probably invented before D. W. Griffith and the movie doesn’t do much to innovate – in essence, the picture is not significantly different from something like the early Lethal Weapon films with Mel Gibson and Danny Glover or, before that, Beverly Hills Cop. But, of course, the reason filmmakers keep churning out movies of this sort is because the formula works, it’s interesting, engaging, and provides an emotional resonance to what would otherwise be mostly squalor and violence. The Guard is a superior example of this kind of picture, filled with characteristically brilliant and dense Irish conversation – everyone is well-read, characters argue over whether Gogol is superior to Dostoevsky, and there are lots of raucously obscene insults and boasts. The script is efficient and the film’s appearance looks very much like early Coen brothers; the images have a graphic punch, are frequently filmed in brightly lit axial (frontal) shots, and McDonagh employs symmetry and slight deviations from symmetrical blocking to balance the pictorial frame. The broadly portrayed minor characters have a grotesque flair reminiscent of Raising Arizona or Blood Simple or Fargo. An action sequence at the end of the movie is derivative of a hundred similar climaxes but well-staged, seemingly realistic, and exciting. I suppose that a close analysis of the film would reveal that it has a somewhat autumnal cast of mind – an important theme is dying well. But this is subordinate to the film’s other pleasures. The witty and lurid dialogue alone makes the film worth seeing. Also worth seeing is the great Fionnula Flanagan, one of the world’s foremost interpreters of the works of James Joyce – she has a minor and pretty much superfluous role as Gleeson’s mother. (We see her reading Oblomov in a hospice where she is dying – probably, a reference to Beckett). I saw Flanagan flat on her back and masturbating at the Guthrie Theater in 1980, I suppose – she was playing Molly Bloom in her one-woman production of Joyce’s Women and it was one of the great experiences in my life, although I’m not sure exactly why. I was happy to see her in this film – she is an old friend.