Seven Psychopaths

David Fincher’s Seven dealt with the Seven Deadly sins. Martin McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths deals with a hard drinking Irish writer named “Marty” (Colin Farrell) in search of a movie. If Marty is an alter ego for Mr. McDonagh then the seven psychopaths created by the writer, which include a serial murderer who leaves the Queen of Diamonds at the scene of his crimes and a Quaker, are a little like Pirandello’s Six Characters only this time they are sorely in search of a director. Still the movie is significant if for no other reason than the debt it owes to a series of predecessors from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining to Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, the Coen brothers No Country for Old Men and Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York. McDonagh’s movie estheticizes violence, along with everything in creation including the act of filmmaking itself. Amongst the many curiosities is a dognapper played by Christopher Walken who feigns reticence when grateful owners reward him for returning their pets (and whose comic exploits might hearken back to Ace Ventura). Walken who wears a cravat which covers the huge scar around his neck explains the nature of the garment to a mobster (Woody Harrelson) who has just murdered his black wife in a digression that recalls Tarantino’s famed “Royale With Cheese”sequence. The movie also includes a Vietnamese veteran whose family has been murdered at My Lai  and whose vengeance involves turning a hooker into an unwilling suicide bomber. And then there is the bizarre logic. Psychopath number one attacks Gandhi’s statement “an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind” by saying “no it doesn’t there’ll be one guy left with an eye.” “The Spanish have bullfighters, the French Cheese and the Irish have drinking” is one explanation offered for Marty’s drunken muddle, though it might not explain how his creator went astray.

Richard III

What is the origin of the evil in Sam Mendes production of Richard III?  Kevin Spacey plays a Richard that will take its place with the great historical renditions of the role and the citations of Mussolini (strung up by his heels), of Qaddafi in his epaulets are quite clear as is the reference to technology (in this case image creation by way of a large screen TV) as the whipping boy of fascism. Elias Canetti wrote a book called Crowds and Power and the crowds in the Bridge Project's rendition of the play abet the evil. This Richard III is not a modernized Shakespearean production influenced by Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Instead Mendes leaves the final chapter of The War of the Roses as a history play that freely partakes of the future.  So that besides our latter day tyrants this Richard is firmly anchored in fantasy and science fiction and could easily be subtitled The Empire Strikes Back. The Star Wars analogy is made clear from the beginning in the futuristic typeface used to project the names of characters who dominate individual scenes. The current production parenthetically also makes one ponder the Shakespearean origins of Star Wars (and other similar fare) with its ornate universe of evil and in the end as Spacey finally holds court and the perspective of the stage is deepened, the set does momentarily take on a sci-fi quality. But Mendes, the director of American Beauty in which Spacey also starred, is known for his visual effects and the stage at BAM is transformed into a buffet of visual references to die for including one scene in which Mendes presents the London Underground as Magritte might have imagined it, with bowler hats and yes clouds. Spacey played Keyser Soze in The Usual Suspects, a character who only acts the part of the cripple as a cover up. Spacey’s gnarled Richard isn’t covering up anything and while the malignity is as superhuman as the performance (whose portrayal of gratuitious evil surpasses even the actor’s John Doe character in David Fincher’s Seven), the shock value comes in the recognition of something almost true to life.