Can someone please tell Ryan Gosling that acting is re-acting? Can someone please tell Ryan Gosling that staring into the middle distance is not the same thing at all.
Can someone please tell director Nicolas Winding Refn that style over substance is fine, but you do have to have some style. Bathing the sets in red light is not the same as having an aesthetic. Using one point perspective does not make you Kubrick. Being deliberately provocative is not the same as being uncompromising. Baiting your audience is not the same as being thought provoking.
As you can probably tell I hated this film, but then I hated Drive too by the same team - so your mileage may vary.
*spoilers*
In this one we are in Bangkok, but really we are in hell. We know this because everything is in red. Ryan Gosling’s brother decides he wants to rape a 14 year old girl but there are none available so he kills a prostitute instead. He sits around leering, waiting for the police to show, because really he’s the devil (we know this because he’s bathed in red, oh, and is framed beneath a big devil’s face). The chief of police (called ‘The Angel of Vengeance’) allows the dead girl’s father to exact revenge, which is nice of him, but then chops off the father’s hand so that he will think about what a bad father he’s been and think about his other daughters and think about how he could have stopped all this violence earlier. That’s the kind of thing the ‘Angel of Vengeance’ does. It’s important; the film will come back to this.
Ryan Gosling likes to watch Thai girls masturbate in front of him. It shows discipline and restraint you see. But then all this violence wells up inside of him so when he finds out his brother has been killed you expect him to ‘get medieval’ on someone’s ass, but no, he lets the prostitute’s father go instead of shooting him because I guess he already knows his brother was a total arse-hole who deserved what he got. You could say he….forgives…geddit?
Which would be the end except that Ryan Gosling’s mother is Kristin Scott Thomas and she’s one pissed off lady. She’s like an Essex version of Lady Macbeth. She’s straight out of a Martina Cole novel. She’s a hardcore gangster. We know this because she shouts at receptionists and says ‘cock’ and ‘cunt’ a lot. She really loves her boys. Really, really loves them in an Oedipus complex kind of way. So, she flies into town and will have her bloody revenge even if it means sidelining sappy Ryan out of her drug smuggling business in the process.
Ryan wishes he could just bring a nice girl home to meet mother and be normal so he plays out that exact situation but hires a classy prostitute to be the ‘nice girl’. Mother’s having none of it and after a meal out together it all ends badly. Ryan suddenly realizes he paid for the girls dress though and demands it back off her in the street even though she’s still wearing it. That’s the kind of guy he is. He shouts during this bit which somewhat shocks the audience because we just assume ‘staring into the middle distance’ is Ryan’s default setting.
So anyway, as you can probably imagine, this soon spirals into a bloody cycle of tit for tat retribution…blah, blah, blah…during which Ryan’s stare has become so irksome that you badly want someone to slap him. When it actually happens and he gets his ass kicked by the ‘Angel of Retribution’ you’ll be cheering.
Towards the end of the film Ryan symbolically penetrates his mother by fingering her fatal wounds (I swear this is all true) and then faces an interesting dilemma. Should he kill The Angel of Vengeance’s wife and daughter like his mother has demanded or let them go like his conscience dictates? In the end he compromises and let’s a henchman kill the wife but shoots the same henchman before he can start on the kid. So, I guess he has learned something along the way but not enough. There’s still one final lesson. In the end he has to face the ‘Angel of Vengeance’ himself in a field. The lesson he learns is that he could have stopped this violence at any point. He learns this lesson by getting his hands chopped off. Bet he won’t be forgetting what a dumbkopf he’s been now.
And then the ‘Angel of Vengeance’ sings some karaoke in a bar as the end credits roll.
I shit you not.
So I guess it’s intended as a meditation on the nature of cyclic violence or something but to be honest it just makes me want to take the director outside and smash his face in.
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