Reckoning is the favourite theme of the McDonagh brothers. Both Martin and John Michael have a tendency in their films towards the ethical and psychological repercussions of great sins, either committed or inherited by principal characters who are then forced to grapple with them. These can skew pretty dark, from the accidental killing of a child in Martin’s In Bruges, to the trauma of child sexual abuse in John Michael’s Calvary, to the spectre of an unsolved rape and murder in Martin’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Always, these things need to be accounted for, the reasons interrogated, and the guilty must have no solace.
The Forgiven is the latest by John Michael, generally the more sombre and low-key of the two (though I haven’t seen his third feature, the America-set War on Everyone). His movies contain comedy just as Martin’s do -but it’s often peppered with a lot more bleakness, especially in Calvary, his best film. This one is certainly a bigger leap for him though, set in the ancient wilds of Morocco -seen for both their unyielding and dangerous remoteness and their abstract prettiness from the western luxuries built upon them. Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain play a wealthy couple on the brink of separation coming out to a party at the gaudy desert mansion of some ex-pats, when inebriated they run over a young local trying to sell some fossils by the road. Much of the film afterwards concerns the consequences for Fiennes’ David, including a journey far into the desert with the victims’ father to bury the body.
There’s actually a narrative split at that point, which defines the movie going forward. While David goes on the long, arduous road trip into the empty desert with strangers he doesn’t much trust and fears will execute him, Chastain’s Jo remains at the remote villa, partying and socializing with all of its’ other obscenely wealthy guests –guests who are for the most part also willfully out of touch with the economic reality of Morocco and the native Berbers there. McDonagh highlights the grotesque opulence by framing it decidedly in perpetual contrast. The lavish Moroccan castle owned by the aristocratic Richard (a delightfully despicable Matt Smith) and his hedonistic lover Dally (an unnerving as ever Caleb Landry Jones) stands out against the empty desert as though it doesn’t belong there, its’ interiors a melange of North African and European aesthetics, the latter clearly encroaching on the former –which remains just enough to be appealingly exotic. And of course tending to the guests are an all-Moroccan staff (who Jo at one point corrects David in calling them servants), obligated to go along with and not comment on the gross display of neocolonialism surrounding them.
And this is without addressing the general attitudes, which even in the more grounded characters like Jo and fellow American Tom (Christopher Abbott), are casually racist, defiantly classist, heavily xenophobic, and (at least in David) provokingly homophobic. McDonagh gets a real glee in heightening the awfulness of his characters, revealing layers and nuances to their horrid personalities in spite of some thinking themselves particularly enlightened and sympathetic to the proletariat. Nobody at the party for instance is much concerned with the manslaughter preceding it, apart from how it will affect David and Jo. In contrast, the Moroccans at the estate having to play Jeeves to a pair of insufferable Bertie Woosters, are portrayed as honest if dismayed through their disaffected manner –though a quiet aggression simmers all throughout as though at any moment we’re about to see a dramatic revolution spearheaded by head butler Hamid (Mourad Zaoui).
While this is happening, David under strict obligation to the powerful father of Driss, the man he killed, is forced through a penitence trek across the desert with that cold patriarch Abdellah (Ismael Kanater) and a small entourage that includes English translator Anouar (Saïd Taghmaoui) -wherein he has no choice but to be humbled. There’s an ever-present dread hanging over him at the prospect of his being killed, a deftly executed high tension despite assurances to the contrary, effective as both a motivator for the character and a challenge for the audience’s expectations. The lack of anything really going wrong is in a way more unnerving than if the shoe were to drop and David were to suddenly be in peril. But what the movie interestingly considers is that this anxiety in David is in fact his guilt, that he gradually comes to accept over the course of this experience. Certainly he is reminded frequently of the gravity of what he did, the personal trauma it has caused for Abdellah, and the psychological toll it is taking on him by being relegated to this space with the people to whom this life mattered -a life David had earlier dismissed as being “a nobody”. He is left alone too for much of this, not permitted to eat with or address Abdellah -he simply must stew with what he has done. It is a terrific performance from Fiennes, who communicates this discomfort very well as a desperate desire for atonement slowly dawns upon him. And yet the move never lets him off the hook, as self-aware and remorseful as he grows. It’s one of the better character arcs I’ve seen this year, especially for such a loathsome figure. Taghmaoui too, always a stand-out, likewise gives one of the greater understated performance I’ve seen recently, as he facilitates much of Fiennes’ relationship with this very different world.
It is at distinct odds with the one that David came from, that haven of excess and pleasure that continues its’ exploitation and tasteless debaucheries while he connects with the people and lifestyle of this land. And it’s curious that his brush with Morocco ultimately runs parallel to Jo’s, who only becomes more attune to the shameless festivity of unchecked affluence and privilege. McDonagh contrasts the couples’ stories with clever shifts in tone, often cutting from a suspenseful or formidable moment for David (the car driving out into the pitch black desert, Driss’ friend incriminating him further) to a scene of utter leisure in the lives of the snobs (Dally organizing an elaborate pirate-themed costume party, Jo engaging in casual flirtation with Tom). In this is also contrasted the tradition and values and spirituality of the Berbers with a flaunting Western disregard for it. There’s a scene of political talk where the gathered Brits, Americans, and French, high on cocaine in this palace they’ve defaced, debate who of their peoples’ the Moroccans hate more -blind to the fact it’s all three colonizers whom they despise and not, as Richard claims, because they think the world should conform to their ways and their religion.
The Forgiven is based on a book by Lawrence Osborne that McDonagh freely admits to straying from. With that in mind I wonder how much of the films’ ending was true. It’s abrupt, much as Calvary’s was, and similarly high stakes -delivering on an inevitability the film had thus far subverted, but is right to be there. And the way in which it comes about is very fascinating. That wicked class satire is rendered with even more irony, David’s pilgrimage with even more conviction. Sometimes a reckoning is bitter, and the accountable need to face it head-on.
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