By: debbie lynn elias
Brendan Gleeson is an actor who, with every performance, makes me admire and appreciate his talent and ability more than I already do. His wry wit wowed me in “Lake Placid”. His transformative characterization into Mad Eye Moody in “Harry Potter” amazed me. While his deadpan schtick as hitman Ken playing foil to Colin Farrell’s childlike Ray in the award winning “In Bruges” had me rooting for him as potential Oscar contender in 2009. Similarly, is there no role that Don Cheadle can’t play? From his heavy hitting performances in films like “Hotel Rwanda”, “Traitor” and “Traffic” to family oriented fare like “The Family Man” or “Hotel for Dogs” and, of course, my favorite Cheadle character, the comically irreverent Basher Tarr in the “Oceans” trilogy, Cheadle is perfection. Now put Gleeson and Cheadle together and what have we got – John Michael McDonagh’s THE GUARD. In what could have been a routine run-of-the-mill murder, drug trafficking, mob/cartel action flick, we instead have a film that explodes with life, filled with subversive humor, laugh-out-loud funny comedy, caustic and callous wit, all adding up to the most unlikely and over-the-top enjoyable buddy cop pairing since Riggs and Murtaugh!
Sergeant Gerry Boyle is not your typical small town Irish cop. Very unpolitically correct with a totally irreverent wry sense of humor, Boyle is nevertheless a dedicated cop in County Galway, despite the fact that he bends the rules to suit a situation – especially if it means saving someone from pain. A man who also appreciates having a good time, Boyle spends his days off at the local hotel surrounded by hookers, but then balances that by caring for his equally irreverent and ailing mother. A true dichotomy, he also has an uncanny knack for coming off as an ignorant buffoon. But is he really that dense and just rides through life with the luck of the Irish or is it all an act? On the other hand, Wendell Everett is a straight-laced by the book African-American FBI agent sent over to Ireland to helm a drug trafficking investigation which, of all things, leads him to Connemara, Galway…and Sgt. Boyle. Where Boyle has been comfortable running things against the grain and according to his own moral code, the apple cart is more than upset by the presence of Everett who is by-the-book, always in the pursuit of justice, and has more than an air of superiority about him, something that doesn’t sit well with the homespun Boyle.
But what do you do when oil and water are mixed together? You shake things up and see what rises to the surface, of course! And with Boyle and Everett, what rises to the surface is a cat and mouse game of mockery between Boyle and Everett, and an intricate web of crime and drug-trafficking that involves the disappearance of Boyle’s new young partner, a blackmailing hooker and corrupt officials and law enforcement officers across the county. And try as he might to stay out of the fracas, Boyle is thrust right into the middle with guns and one-liners blazing.
Without a doubt this is the greatest performance Gleeson has given to date. Brilliantly portraying Boyle [“Who really does know what he’s doing], Gleeson gives him this great acerbic crust complimented with a delicious droll delivery. Boyle “doesn’t see that you have to conform.” You see it in “his refusal to be politically correct and in his refusal to just take glib answers for anything. He always tests something out. Boyle has a wish to shock because he’s bored out of his mind and he wants somebody to go off in any direction. But there’s a whole lot behind it. It’s more than just a life. What’s he doing? And then you find there is another aspect to him. He kind of turns into fuzzy bear or something. That kind of becomes fun when exploring [the character].” Gleeson tacitly displays Boyle’s heart of gold and a humanity that is showcased by tender dialogue between Gleeson and Fionnula Flanagan, who plays Boyle’s mother. To his credit, Gleeson keeps this humanity well hidden in his performance but for his scenes with Flanagan and Katarina Cas who plays the wife of Boyle’s missing partner. As funny as Gleeson’s scenes are with Cheadle, they are equally tender and telling with Flanagan and Cas.
Turning to Don Cheadle, all I can say is that he is a hoot and holler as Wendell Everett. For Gleeson, the experience of working with Cheadle is nothing short of wonderful. “That’s the joy of having someone like Don across the table. You throw it out and he [as Everett] kinda gets it…and then the subtext becomes far more interesting” Cheadle plays Everett to grand affect as foil to Gleeson’s Boyle. “When I read the read the script, the great contrast is this character [Everett] coming over [to Ireland], thinking he knows so much and how to be arrogant and thinks he’s gonna show these yokels how it works and if they just listen to the wisdom coming down from on high, they’ll be alright. And he bumps into this guy who’s like a clown but who actually knows more than anybody over there. They form this relationship of inconvenience where he has to go along with this guy [Boyle] because he’s actually got the goods.” Key is the chemistry between Gleeson and Cheadle. It is impeccable. Their timing is shear perfection. They feed off of each other with gleeful delight. For Cheadle, “It turned out to be very easy. . .Brendan is just a very easy person, very generous. He’s really open. We – he, John and I – have a very similar, sick outlook on life which we discovered in the first five minutes that we sat down together.” In fact, Cheadle was so impressed with the script, McDonagh and Gleeson, that he stepped in on a producing level in order to get the film made.
Not to be missed is a delicious turn by Mark Strong as drug kingpin Clive Cornell. Joining Strong with equally strong – and hysterical – performances are Liam Cunningham and David Wilmot as Cornell’s henchmen, Francis Sheehy and Liam O’Leary, respectively.
THE GUARD marks the feature debut of John Michael McDonagh as both writer and director. If the name sounds familiar it might be because his brother, Martin McDonagh, is the man behind “In Bruges” which also starred Gleeson. A snappy, new, reinvention of the cop buddy movie, with energetic dialogue at the heart of this character driven piece, both Cheadle and Gleeson agree that with THE GUARD, “When you’ve got the material, you try to do something with it. It was a beautifully written script.”
Writing the initial script in 13 days, McDonagh “had the character in my mind for a lot longer. I’d done a short film where this character appears, comes into a bar, says lots of obnoxious things and then leaves. I always wondered where he went. Who else did he abuse that evening? And then there was a seizure of drugs off the coast of Cork. And I thought, ‘well, that’s the plot. Some kind of a thriller plot.’ But then I thought, ‘well, he’s annoying these people in this small town but they wouldn’t know it, so I need to have him up against somebody he would really offend. An American. An FBI agent. A Black FBI agent. And then as you’re writing it I don’t think about ‘Is that going too far? Is that too much?’ It just all comes out. The only criteria I have is…I try not have the sort of gaga where you’re picking on somebody defenseless. To me, that’s going too far.”
Described by Cheadle as a script being “very fully realized and complete”, the characters are real, sharply defined by razor-edged dialogue and visual design. For every crisply ironed crease on the pants of Wendell Everett is a wrinkle or untucked shirt on Gerry Boyle. For every sharp-tongued retort by Boyle is a calm, non-blinking response from Everett. A cleverly designed plot, full of shoot ‘em up action, never gets or feels bogged down or stalled and is as dependent on the visuals as it is the dialogue. But at its heart, THE GUARD is funny, funny, funny. Editing is fast and crisp, moving the pacing with an even quickness that parlays the rapid-paced dialogue.
It is inevitable that John faces comparison with his brother Martin – especially with a film like THE GUARD. According to Gleeson, “I blame the mother” for the excellence that we’ve seen from both. Although the McDonaghs “come out of the same house. They are very different voices. But if you can try to imagine Gerry Boyle in ‘In Bruges’, it doesn’t work. And if you try to take anybody from ‘In Bruges’ and place them in THE GUARD, it doesn’t work. The two of them have a certain ferocity about them in the way they attack their work. They have a real savagery in the way they are intolerant of any sort of glibness or lazy writing. Their stuff is always crystal and they’re really tough on themselves that way. There are definite similarities.” Same way with direction. Both McDonaghs are “clear about what they want in terms of whether its framing, in terms of the set, in terms of the references. There is that commonality. But the voices are very very different and the words are very different. That’s the joy of it for me. I get to go into it completely mad and anarchic [in terms of Gerry Boyle’s mind and his ‘distrust of everyone’] and kind of soulful.”
Lensed and lit by cinematographer Larry Smith, the visual result is beautiful, punctuated with color and light against the greys of the wintery Atlantic Ocean and showcasing the calculated production design and specific use of color designed by John Paul Kelly in close concert with McDonagh.
On a tight shooting schedule, Mother Nature was not a friend to THE GUARD. Even for native Gleeson, “It was bloody freezing. And the rain was kind of horizontal. It was like somebody just threw the Atlantic Ocean at us for 7 or 8 weeks.” And yes, Gleeson does his own swimming in the icy Irish Sea which is 2-3 degrees colder than the already frigid Atlantic. “I’ll never forget it. It was in December. And you try and look like Halle Berry in a swimsuit.”
For John Michael McDonagh, the message of THE GUARD [of there is one] is laughingly simple – “Be true to yourself, even if you’re a complete bastard.” So this weekend, just have a ball. Let your own guard down with THE GUARD.
Gerry Boyle – Brendan Gleeson
Wendell Everett – Don Cheadle
Clive Cornell – Mark Strong
Written and Directed by John Michael McDonagh.
