44 Inch Chest
Dir: Malcolm Venville
Rating: 4.0/5.0
Image Entertainment
95 Minutes
44 Inch Chest might be the first film ever made about a mopey gangster. No surprise that the film comes from the minds of screenwriters Louis Mellis and David Scinto whose previous screenplay, Sexy Beast, was about denying gangster indulgence in favor of living a quiet, picturesque life by a pool in Spain. 44-Inch Chest, by comparison, is about a gangster who’s too heartbroken to kill the guy who wronged him.
Again Ray Winstone plays the lead, this time a cuckolded gangster named Colin Diamond whose wife Liz (Joanne Whalley) walks out on him in favor of some handsome young guy (Melvil Poupaud) who Diamond’s buddies (John Hurt, Tom Wilkinson, Ian McShane, Stephen Dillane) have kidnapped and locked in the eponymous piece of furniture in a grimy safehouse. What follows is a Hamlet-like deferral of revenge as the ol’ gang encourages Diamond to really give it to Loverboy (Poupaud’s actual film credit) while Diamond mopes, flashes back to the last conversation he had with his wife and drinks straight from the bottle — things you’d never see a Guy Ritchie character do. Well, except maybe the last bit.
The film’s major preoccupation seems to be subverting gangster stereotypes. The film opens with Colin Diamond lying on the carpet of his trashed home listening to sad music. The first time we see Archie (Wilkinson) he’s tending to his invalid mum whilst wearing a frilly apron. Hurt’s character, a cranky old school gangster, goes by the name “Peanut.” Meanwhile, the suave, confident Meredith (McShane), easily the most gangster of the bunch, is a rampant homosexual. This makes the gang seem less like cool archetypes hanging out at the pub until it’s time to whack someone and more like real people with their own lives outside doing things that would be set to cool music.
44 Inch Chest, by the way, takes place mostly in the aforementioned safehouse as the gangsters exchange snappy, often hilarious dialogue word liberally peppered with the word “cunt” as they size up their bound captive. In other words, it’s Reservoir Dogs, re-imagined by David Mamet and acted by serious thespians. While it sometimes feels like it may have been based on a play, it’s actually an original screenplay, which reveals the state of cinema. Films too often overcompensate by cutting to multiple locations to seem dynamic and fast-paced, so it’s refreshing to see a film that is perfectly confident taking place in one room save for flashbacks and a credits sequence set-up. Plus, the focus on character interaction makes for some choice bon mots like “Fucked his wife. Fucked his fucking wife. You fucking wife-fucker, you. You fucked his fucking wife, you wife-fucking cunt” which challenges equally quotable “bunch of guys in a room” movies like Glengarry Glen Ross (“Coffee’s for closers only!”) and Frost/Nixon (“When the President does it, that means it’s not illegal!”).
Couple that so-called static-ness with Malcolm Venville’s non-flashy direction (compared to the superstylized Jonathan Glazer on Sexy Beast) and 44 Inch Chest is stripped down to the point of becoming downright intimate, which is a strange word to use to describe a gangster flick. Without the high body count and high concepts, we hang onto the dialogue and anticipate the film’s one touted moment of violence, which allows the film to become subtly surreal when we least expect it. It’s a film that simmers instead of boils, which will probably make the bloodthirsty squirm in their seats out of boredom. For the rest of us, though, 44 Inch Chest is tense and highly entertaining. Especially for a movie about a bunch of guys in a room.
by Danny Djeljosevic
