The Gentlemen (Guy Ritchie, 2020)
Watching Guy Ritchie’s latest film proved to be a very useful experience. While I was entertained in parts, and interested in how the convoluted plot worked itself out, I was also incredibly put off by the affected mannerisms of each character. Mainly, however, I found the film to be very ugly around its presentation of violence, most of it accompanied by verbal and physical humiliation. Normally, I respond well to movies that wallow in bad taste, and I would also consider myself to be an aficionado of on screen violence. Was I being hypocritical, then? I am a fan of Quentin Tarantino after all, who has also attracted some criticisms around his throwaway attitude to violence.
However, Tarantino circumvents these criticisms for two reasons. Firstly, many of his narratives take place in a ‘movie universe’, which provides a distancing context for whatever occurs. Secondly, he seems to have a greater understanding of the psychological and physical repercussions of violence that Ritchie hasn’t yet demonstrated. Tarantino’s characters are both perpetrators and victims of violence, none of them are immune from the consequences of the worlds they inhabit. Take, for example, the scene where Marvin accidentally dies in Pulp Fiction. This is on the surface a glib moment. But it then develops into an examination of the hugely traumatic physical effects of being shot by showing us the aftermath and what it takes to clean up the mess. The perpetrator, Vincent Vega, is also eventually ignominiously killed. If you watch the seemingly nasty and cheap rape flashback in The Hateful Eight, you will notice that the rapist, played by Samuel L. Jackson, may well have made up the story; we witness him picking up details relevant to his tale in the moments leading up to where he uses it to goad a man into going for his gun. Like in Pulp Fiction, he is also a victim of an ironic fate by being shot in the balls and slowly bleeding to death in the final act of the movie.
These moments of depth and nuance do not often appear in Ritchie’s crime narratives. The violence is almost entirely played for laughs in a way that made me feel a little irritated, if not quite uncomfortable, by they way we are asked to side with the strong against the victims. I had the same reaction when watching his previous gangster film, Rocknrolla. Yet Snatch, which I love, succeeds because Turkish and Tommy show fear, are reluctant to get involved in physical confrontations, and spend most of the film trying to avoid significantly stronger, more aggressive, and more violent men. When the violence happens, it is often surreal, and the comedy comes from its absurdity and sense of shock.
I haven’t fully worked through how I feel about all of this, and I am certainly not convinced about any of my assessments or analysis. So, despite its flaws (or at least, what I saw as flaws) I am grateful to The Gentlemen for forcing me to confront my own reactions and possible hypocrisy around violence on screen.
James Edward Newton 