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| Only God Forgives Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn Zero Stars |
Some
spoilers exist herein
This film is a piece of work. Only God Forgives evoked in me the most
visceral disgust that I can recall feeling in a cinema for a number of years.
This film obsesses over, yearns for, and savors sadism. When it isn't coming
up with abhorrent scenarios to subject its audience to, it commits the even
worse cinematic crime of being insufferably boring.
Danish director Nicholas Winding Refn had
some success a few years ago with the Ryan Gosling vehicle (pardon the pun) Drive. My impressions of that movie were that Refn was a terrifically talented visual director, with an ear for
soundtrack but a worrying tendency to savor violent acts and present them
almost lovingly. Boy, I had no idea what was coming in his next feature.
The horrendous violence on display in Only God Forgives is sickening, and
serves an artistic purpose that is half-assed and poorly executed. Ryan Gosling
plays Julian, an American expatriate who makes a living smuggling drugs out of
a Muay Thai boxing center in Bangkok. His brother Billy goes on a violent spree
that culminates in him brutally raping and murdering a 16-year-old prostitute.
This is brought to the attention of Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), a police
officer with shady ethical boundaries, who sanctions Billy’s murder. Julian’s
mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) arrives, determined to assist Julian in seeking
vengeance for her son’s death.
Despite its best efforts to distinguish
itself from everything else at the multiplex, the structure of the film is
actually quite predictable. A few sequences of flat, expressionless dialogue
delivered in a manner we've seen done much better in David Lynch movies,
followed by an outburst of tremendously detailed violence that would have been
passé in a mid-1990s David Cronenburg movie. Most of the violence is usually
performed in front of a swathe of bystanders who sit or stand by with blank
looks on their faces. Woop-tee-do. The shock of the violence wears off after the
first or second instance (although the film’s latter stages are plenty
disgusting). The tedium of the presentation is what lived with me.
Only
God Forgives is, it would seem, an exploration of
the psyche of a man with a particularly powerful and dangerous Oedipal complex.
It’s not presented with much subtlety – see, for instance, a conversation in
which Julian’s mother claims that Julian couldn't live up to Billy because
Billy possessed the larger penis of the two. Refn is on record as confirming
that Only God Forgives takes
place in a woman’s vagina. I’m not sure if we can decipher this from the
evidence in the picture – although there are a lot of long, narrow passages and
softly-lit, warm-looking spaces. And there is a moment in which Julian (in
slow-motion, of course) further eviscerates his mother’s corpse and reaches
into her womb…
Whatever. You’re getting the idea of the
pretension on display in this movie. It’s a movie that so badly wants to convince us of its cleverness and brilliance. It
gets so caught up in its own genius that it forgets the basics of storytelling
– creating compelling characters and believable story arcs. The problem here is
not that the characters are all completely psychopathic and unlikable. It’s
that they’re uninteresting. Everyone in this movie is uniformly blank. They
move in painful-to-watch slow motion. They allow no emotion to pass over their
faces. They glide from one disgusting set piece to another. They show no
remorse, no grief, no love, nothing. Even the hints at Julian’s ethical code
(refusing to allow an innocent young girl to die, for instance) seem to come
from some alien, inhumane realm. The characterization in this movie is a
boring one-trick pony. Nicolas Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives is a trick that isn't worth giving the time of
day.
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