Seven Psychopaths

Quite literally a "shaggy dog story," Martin McDonagh's hyperactive, Ritalin-soaked Seven Psychopaths (2013) teems with ideas.  No matter that most of them are bad or meretricious; a lot of ueber-violent crime/action pictures don't have any ideas at all.  McDonagh uses the word "psychopath" to mean either an extremely violent person or someone afflicted with an obsession that drives them to act in an outrageous manner -- I don't think this is correct or accurate, but the notion, which McDonagh would argue, is a fiction in any event, merely a plot device de rigueur in Hollywood, drives the picture.  Indeed, concealed behind all the gaudy flamethrower killings and close-range shootings, hidden by the spurting blood and beheadings, McDonagh's film is pedantic, something like a graduate school thesis:  "The Use of the Figure of the Psychopath" in the American Cinema," a little like a doctoral essay on "The Metaphor of the Garden in 18th Century Poetry."  The film has two intersecting frame stories:  an Irish screenwriter's friend is in league with a sinister old man who kidnaps dogs and, then, returns them to their owners to collect reward money; the Irish screenwriter recognizes that Hollywood demands movies about serial killers -- that is psychopathic murderers -- and decides to write the ultimate psychopathic killer movie, a film featuring not one but seven psychopaths.  These two framing narratives provide the basis for the elaborate system of coincidences and bloody encounters that comprises the film.  In form, McDonagh's picture is a ultra-violent meta-fiction and its stories within stories resembles the ultimate in meta-narratives, Flann O'Brien's novel, At Swim Two-Birds.  The film is drenched in whiskey like O'Brien's stories and it's nested tales are intricately wrought, a kind of Celtic arabesque of stories embedded in stories in which the film's writer can be perceived -- indeed is shown -- to be manipulating the outcome and controlling the strings that jerk and contort his marionettes.  (At Swim Two-Birds with its gunfights and horrific beatings is also staggeringly violent.)  In Seven Psychopaths, the screenwriter's buddy (Sam Rockwell) unwittingly abducts a bloodthirsty mobster's Shih Tzu dog.  The mobster played by Woody Harrelson with vicious aplomb unleashes a horde of  villains on the hapless dog-nappers.  But the leader of the dog-napping gang is played by Christopher Walken, who is married to a psycho-killer who preys on other psycho-killers.  Lurking around the edges of the action is a Vietnamese assassin who has come to the United States to wreak revenge on the members of the "Charlie Company" that slaughtered his family at My Lai.  As one character remarks to the screenwriter, "you can't write women and they exist in your films only to be summarily butchered" -- an accurate criticism of the various bimbos who get slaughtered in this film.  Martin, the screenwriter, expresses contempt for the genre of film that he is composing and, indeed, suggests that he will manage this picture to avoid clichés typical to the form -- instead of a climactic shoot-out, the film will feature universal reconciliation, everything resolved by debate and compromise, and throughout the picture there are images of Gandhi and citations of his words.  But McDonagh doesn't have the guts to follow-through on a program that would be truly radical and surprising and so the audience is disappointed when the last twenty minutes of this briskly paced film degenerates into simply more murderous gunplay and gratuitous violence.  After the set-up, it feels like a cheat; McDonagh is obviously luxuriating in the stuff he has pretended to despise.  McDonagh does have a couple of surprising tricks up his sleeve -- in particular, the subplot involving the vicious, revenge-driven Vietnamese terrorist takes an interesting turn suggesting that non-violence and, even, sanctity are just forms of psychopathy that have been turned upside-down or, maybe, inside-out. The film becomes serious for a moment and there are some jarring shifts in tone that don't always work.  The dialogue is all sub-Tarantino:  everyone speaks in competitive, hipster non sequiturs.  This film is sophomoric, but, I don't necessarily mean this in a bad way -- it's agile, ambitious, crammed with outrageous incidents, the product of too much marijuana and booze, a victim of its own ambitions, an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink production.