Film #69 - Seven Psychopaths

I’ve been struggling with the opening paragraph of this review. Not because I don’t know what I think of Seven Psychopaths but because it’s one of those films that already has such hype around it that I feel like my opinion was handed to me before I walked in.

Except, I struggle to feel this hype even as I can academically understand where it comes from.

Having been pleasantly surprised by Martin McDonagh’s previous In Bruges, a film which rehabilitated Colin Farrell as an actor for me, I had been disappointed to miss out on Seven Psychopaths as part of TIFF (I went to see Blancanieves instead). Now I’m glad I was able to free up that slot after what I’d call a fairly underwhelming experience.

It’s not that there’s anything that’s outright wrong with Seven Psychopaths. It hums along quite nicely, the performers are engaged with the material, there’s some lovely pathos etc. etc. It just didn’t ever come together as a coherent film for me despite the fact that McDonagh is definitely tipping his hand to some interesting things.

Sam Rockwell is always a reason to go see a film.
The dog is just icing

Spieling out like an Elmore Leonard novel, Seven Psychopaths  is putatively the story of Marty (Farrell) a semi-successful semi-alcoholic screenwriter struggling with the first draft of his next script (also entitled Seven Psychopaths) who is drawn into friend Billy’s (Sam Rockwell) dog-kidnapping business with partner Hans (Christopher Walken).

Billy and Hans have recently bitten off more than they can chew having kidnapped local crime boss Charlie’s (Woody Harrelson) beloved pup, sending Charlie on a mission of revenge.

As Marty attempts to extricate himself from Charlie's assumption he's in on the whole deal, he is concurrently developing the list of the seven psychopaths he will use in his script, allowing Seven Psychopaths to divert into a number of shirt vignettes exploring each of their stories.

If this were a typical noir or crime film, it would probably be a tightly wound little potboiler with all the requisite twists and turns. But McDonagh is not trying for that at all. Instead the film is filled with space, between characters and between characters and their environments. It’s a genre plot in a non-genre film.

Abbie Cornish. Prominent on the poster,
scant in the film itself. Ditto all the women

Marty’s screenwriting allows the characters to talk about how film and genre work and its through this meta-commentary that we get a sense of what McDonagh’s trying for. Marty wants to explode the crime genre and make it transformative rather exploitative, for it to have the power to communicate raw human emotion.

That’s certainly present in Seven Psychopaths. Several of the psychopaths’ vignettes reveal that they are less psychotic than extraordinarily motivated by justice and revenge and Hans’ relationship with his cancer-stricken wife is deeply touching and there’s an attempt made for a destructive-meets-uplifting finale.

But, as Billy complains to Marty, you can’t make a film called Seven Psychopaths and not expect audiences to want to see the psychos. Maybe that’s a jab at dumb genre-driven audience members but, hey, I’m probably one of them and felt the same way.

Christopher Walken gives a delightful laconic
performance. But this is Christopher Walken, you knew
you were getting that going in.

The result for me was a film that had too much space in it; the characters drifted too far away from me and I couldn’t get a handle on them, couldn’t get to care about them. This was compounded for me by a deeply personal issue – I struggle to enjoy films set in LA that are about LA. I had the exact same problem with Get Shorty.

On walking out, I felt large chunks of the film were just cool for the sake of being cool, which I’ve since had time to reconsider but can’t quite wash the taste of from my mouth. The marketing campaign hasn’t helped.

All in all, I recognise that Seven Psychopaths is probably a very smart, engaging film. I’m just part of an audience that will understand that but never feel it.