Up Jumped the Devil: In Praise of Nicolas Winding Refn's "Only God Forgives"

To begin: yes, I know this blog has become the lawn that I never mow. But I have been keeping track of everything I see. With a little luck, I'll soon get back to updating Extended Cut...but only after I finish the latest phase of an ongoing project. Thanks for your...well, I don't know what.

Also: there are lots of spoilers ahead. Lots.

Only God Forgives reminds me of a Nick Cave song. It's full of pompous swagger because it's an expression of the artist's fascination with preening machismo. Think of Cave's version of "Stagger Lee." That song ends with "the bad motherfucker called Stagger Lee" getting a blow job, and blowing a rival suitor's brains out. The song's excesses are pointed. It's a half-sneering, half-celebratory destruction of the chauvnism inherent in Cave's persona. It's about a badass that is so desperate, and so unhinged that he'll make good on all of his delirious threats (50 good pussies just to get to one fat boy's asshole? You don't say...). The main difference between a Cave song and a Nicolas Winding Refn film is that Cave performs as himself. He is Mistah Staggah Lee, his own best joke. The same cannot be said about Refn's recent films. He is their primary author, but he's not immediately dabbling with his own image. Still, both artists deal in excess, and love to explore the hetero male id at its most reptilian.

Refn's latest is, to some extent, of a piece with both Valhalla Rising and Drive. As in both of those films, Refn represents the world in Only God Forgives as a surreal mix of dream, and reality. You can see that when Lieutenant Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm) sings karaoke. Chang's singing establishes two things. The first karaoke scene suggests that the film's Bangkok is a world that exists independently of Julian's (Ryan Gosling) story. But the second scene, when Chang sings a song called "You Are My Dream" on the film's soundtrack, complicates that notion. It's the film's concluding sequence, the kind of scene a dreamer sees just before waking up. In a moment of panic, Julian's imagines/sees life without himself. Julian's dream Bangkok, a city that Chang comfortably navigates, and disappears into as if he were its avatar, has rejected him. In this case, the nightmare outlives its creator/main subject.

RV!: Drive (2011), 7) Modern Romance (1981)

RV!: Drive (2011) Dir: Nicolas Winding Refn Date Released: September 16, 2011 Date Seen: January 4, 2012 Rating: 3.5/5

7) Modern Romance (1981) Dir: Albert Brooks Date Released: March 13, 1981 Date Seen: January 6, 2012 Rating: 4.25/5

The former film has slightly diminished since I last saw it. But the latter film: wowee wow wow! See my piece on the future of Albert Brooks, then and now, for Capital New York.

193) Valhalla Rising (2009)

193) Valhalla Rising (2009) Dir: Nicolas Winding Refn Date Released: July 2010 Date Seen: June 13, 2010 Rating: 3.5/5

Not Refn's best effort but so ambitious, so dissonant in the central aesthetic clash between comic book realism and Malickian lyricism that I was engaged throughout. Still think Refn's someone to look out for but that his best effort may still be Pusher II. See my second interview with him for the New York Press, which unfortunately cuts off the funnier bits I allude to about how he wants to direct a Wonder Woman adaptation.

152) Bronson (2009)

152) Bronson (2009) Dir: Nicolas Winding Refn Date Released: October 2009 Date Seen: May 30th, 2009 Rating: 3.5/5

There's a decent stretch of Bronson, Nicolas Winding Refn's surreal faux autobiography of Michael Peterson (AKA Charles Bronson), that detaches itself from our protagonist's controlling POV. In it, it becomes clear that Refn is no longer allowing the man to tell his story in his words and images but is rather speaking for him as a ventriloquist. While the film's first half makes it seem as if Bronson's grandiose world of theatrical bloodshed is being respectfully recreated, the aforementioned period in the film's second half substantiates an unsettling but unavoidable truth about Refn's character study. Being the cocksure and sufficiently talented young artist that he is, Refn patronizingly trying to turn Michael Peterson into the next Alex.

The surname-less Alex I'm referring to is of course the egomaniacal prison system victim in William Burgess and Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. Comparing Alex to Bronson is easy considering how both are essentially wild animals turned feral by prison cruelty. As the film's coda announces, Bronson, (Tom Hardy, in his bravura breakout role) "is Britain's most famous prisoner," because he's one of the most violent and the most stringently repressed--"He has spent 34 years in jail, 30 of them in solitary confinement." Bronson's story is thus one that centers on his continual struggle to re-assert control of his emotions and his life. Because he would turn his life into an opera, he alternately narrates his story from a prison cell and from a theater stage in front of an imaginary full house. 

That kind of naked ambition is one that Refn readily accommodates but not without a queasy sense of humor. Bronson's mercurial nature, partly due to his surroundings but mostly because of his brutal restlessness, lends itself to cruelly condescending jokes at his expense. One minute he's barking the "c" word at a prison guard he's taken hostage and the next he's meekly asking him, "Well, what happens now?" Refn turns him into a confused monster in a world he never created, a tragic savage that constantly lashes out to maintain the illusion of power. This makes Bronson a gorgeously constructed case study that is far too easy to tease meaning out of. 

During the scenes where Bronson's out of prison for a scant 69 days (he robs a jewelry store), we see Refn poke take some revelatory jabs at our anti-hero but we also see him ease back and tell his story in a more honest and less obtrusive way. We get to see him stripped of his imaginary audience and his vaudeville make-up, a clownish figure permanently out of touch with reality. Here, Hardy shows his skill with broad comedic gestures that make him look like an indignant doberman. As a sequence unto itself, it works wonderfully but as part of a story where a mustachioed gorilla tries to build himself up to the Olympian heights of movie stardom through fantastic brawling, it's a long, hard dose of movie-reality. 

Note: I liked Hardy's muscular performance quite a bit but I think I'll wait 'til I rewatch this one or see him in something else that can confirm my opinion of him. I can't remember him too well from Rock n Rolla but I remember that he was in it. Eh, time will tell.