The cinema-goer watches Seven Psychopaths, the newly released film by Martin McDonagh, with five other people in a multi-screen cinema; three men and a woman and a man, all aged twenty-five to thirty years.
Seven Psychopaths is genred 'comedy' and 'crime' by the International Movie Data Base (imdb).
No one laughs.
Una Mullally, writing in The Irish Times, watches the film with a different audience.
I watched Seven Psychopaths at a screening mainly attended by people who work in film. With such an audience, the thigh-slapping after every joke would have been drowned out only by the backslapping when an Irish film, or one perceived to be Irish, gets a wide release.
The cinema-goer sees the film open badly. A visual cliché segues into blandly unfunny dialogue, which alludes to the work of Quentin Tarantino, in a scene that ends with another visual cliché: a man in a red ski-mask shooting men in the back of the head.
No one laughs. The cinema-goer has no sense of witnessing a crime on film.
The sense of something unoriginal unfolding in front of the cinema-goer leads to thoughts of leaving the cinema.
Further visual, textual and directorial allusions and clichés follow in a disengaging narrative. Any dramatic weight is lost when what's at stake is the stealing of pets from self-obsessed rich people. The fetishising of pets by psychopaths is a theme Martin McDonagh has used before, in his stage-play The Lieutenant of Inishmore.
The film-makers appeal to irony. It is worrying when artists present their intentions in interviews rather than in the work itself.
But its self-knowledge doesn’t make its humiliating depictions of women and infantile homophobia any less lame. In stand-up you can get away with making jokes about rape, paedophilia, the Holocaust or whatever you’re having yourself as long as they’re funny, as long as the pay-off is greater than the offensiveness. Transfer that test to film and McDonagh fails.
Jokes or not, no one laughs.
The cinema-goer wonders if irony is possible in mainstream films. Does the two-dimensional nature of the medium thoroughly flatten all nuance?
No one laughs. There is a patent absence of wit. One of the men guffaws. Snorts? Belches?
The cinema-goer, on a separate occasion, sees a pantomime. A dwarf approaches the front of the stage and says 'Women are only trouble, aren't they lads?' which reaps muted groans of agreement from some males in the audience and tired groans of 'oh, come on, you grumpy dwarf, you can do better that' from most others. A four year old boy asserts: 'Women are not trouble, so they're not.'
The cinema-goer wonders how the child's resistance to such grim clichés, ironic or not, will hold up, when faced with them in adult films.
Is there more irony in a panto than in a contemporary film?
McDonagh is remarkably talented. I’m a fan. But I don’t think I’ve experienced a more depressing moment in film this year than a cinemaful of people laughing at the last (of many) “fag” jokes in Seven Psychopaths. I’m sure some people got the bludgeoning “subtlety” of its context, but tell that to those who have the same slurs shouted across the street at them when McDonagh isn’t there to hold up a neon irony sign.
The cinema-goer notes the colour palette in the film is neon, day-time and night-time, interiors and exteriors. Scenes of The Joshua Tree National Park (33 degrees North, 115 degrees West), handy to Los Angeles and already another cliché, fill the cinema-goer with a dreaded sense of an artist aping other artists with whom he may be friendly or appears to want to be friendly with, by way of knowing asides. Is there Bono-money in this production?
Redemption is often a theme in comedy and crime films. The cinema-goer sees it in the stirring performances of Christopher Walken and Sam Rockwell. Colin Farrell plays well too. It is not his fault that he is playing another cliché: a drunken Irishman. The cinema-goer reflects that contemporary Irish writers are not drunks.
There are women in the film. Their fate is an early exit. They are suffered, shagged (almost) and shot.
The representation of women is a joke within the film itself, that women exist in movies only to be killed, along with the undercurrent throughout that it’s far less acceptable to kill animals in a film than it is to kill women.
On screen, only 11 per cent of protagonists in last year’s top 100 films were women.
At the end, the cinema-goer leaves the cinema with a question faced after watching In Bruges.
Why are resources of talent and money deployed to make such witless work?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1931533/
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