The Guard
Time for more rantings: I am not particularly efficient these days. I should work on my take-home final and I need to make some more progress on research. Feeling guilty for watching too many movies, I have now stopped doing that, but now there’s a compulsion to compensate for that which has now officially kicked in: I plan to go to school on Sunday just to get Starbucks mugs for cheaper (and hope that they will be there!), I am meeting with people for lunch today and Saturday, and I prefer thinking about things I want to buy rather than things I want to do. (Going on a trip on Christmas is the big exception here. But then again, that is also an extremely money-consuming endeavor which will serve my desire to escape the stressful world of work at the moment.) I totally am aware that
But then there are these movies which fall out of the scheme. I am not watching such films to escape anything, I am watching them because I really, really want to. Pixelmatsch ranked it second in his Berlinale 2011 list (I think that is only because he is biased towards “Come rain, come sunshine”) and later on, Loris and other people heartily recommended it to me. It was a film I had extremely high expectations for, I was excited almost to a physical level when I finally could watch the film.
“The Guard” did not disappoint. It had great actors and a very fluid, suspenseful storytelling. I absolutely loved the way the film was referencing other genres (haha Western shootout!) but I could not help but constantly compare it both to “Memories of Murder”, with which it shares the theme and the scenery, and “In Bruges” with which is shares Brendan Gleeson and almost everything else – atmosphere, human interaction, silly philosophical villains, a relatively weak female character, the ending. The McDonaugh brothers are geniuses, and while I still think that “In Bruges” is the greater film, “The Guard” has its own merits. Hopelessly funny and with some sweet surprises here and there, it focuses very closely on Brendan Gleeson’s character and develops it better. Unlike “In Bruges”, he is a little bit of a representation for the sloppy, proud and openly racist Irishman. The racism is a prime example for why he’s a complicated character – the black FBI he befriends says he cannot figure out whether he is really smart or really dumb. I’d say you cannot quite figure out anything about him. But no matter how he really is, whether he is good or bad – all these things we see about him make this character unusually likable.
As with “In Bruges”, the end makes you ponder. When I see a film like this with an open end, I prefer to think of them as such but with the strong possibility that the person survived. I am optimistic like that. In both films, it is as if the entire story was designed to let the character who might have survived live at the end. In the case of “In Bruges”, Gleeson’s character practically sacrificed himself for the other; in the case of “The Guard”, the open end fits the character, but it also makes a lot of sense. He needs to escape the bigger bosses who are pulling the strings behind the drug business, and faking his death even if it is to his closest friends is the safest way to achieve that. If he is smart, which I’d expect given his great reasonings throughout the film, then this is almost the obvious course of action. In that respect, I am quite happy to see a film that is so consistent in its writing and makes so much sense.
Here’s hoping that “The Guard” will achieve the success it deserves. If you didn’t like “In Bruges” (how can you not?!) you will most likely also not like this one. But if you do, “The Guard” is a must see as it was perhaps one of the most enjoyable films I have seen this year.