Castles in Spain. - Review - movie review

National Review, July 9, 2001 by John Simon

All of the characters in the British film noir Sexy Beast have extensive past or present criminal records, and in the course of the story a major heist and two murders are committed; yet nowhere is there the slightest evidence of a past or present brush with the law. Whatever troubles they have are with one another, and information about their past is sketchy. So the plot unfolds in a field almost hermetically sealed off from any sort of real-world context.

This could have been a major flaw if it weren't for other very considerable compensations. The superior screenplay is by Louis Mellis and David Scinto, who, apparently, are playwrights and have come up with literate, but nowise literary, dialogue, unusual in your typical gangster films. For example, they are not afraid of having the fiendish sociopath Don Logan (Ben Kingsley) do such things as sarcastically repeat what is said to him verbatim, but with a sinisterly sardonic spin. Or express his fierce disapproval by uttering the one word no more times than the dying Lear exclaims never. Or conduct a brutish conversation with his own mirror image while shaving.

Sexy Beast begins by introducing us to Gary "Gal" Dove (Ray Winstone), a retired safecracker taking it easy in his modern hillside villa on Spain's Costa del Sol, which he shares with his beloved wife DeeDee (Amanda Redman), a former porn actress. Nearby are his former fellow in crime, Aitch (Cavan Kendall), and Aitch's consort, Jackie (Julianne White), with whom Gal and DeeDee share eating, drinking, and perhaps other pleasures.

The opening sequence has Gal sunning himself by his pool, trying to give his by now somewhat flabby, pinky-white British body some Mediterranean tan, even as a Murilloesque houseboy is languidly sweeping up around the pool. The lazily sultry atmosphere is suddenly ripped apart by a boulder that comes thundering down the hillside and, narrowly missing Gal, crashes into the pool, coming to rest atop the colored tiles arranged in the shape of a pair of entwined hearts.

This is canny foreshadowing: Out of left field comes danger, possibly deadly, and certainly threatening Gal and DeeDee's middle-aged bliss. That danger is Don Logan, who has been sent by Gal's former boss, Teddy Bass (Ian McShane), to corral him out of retirement and into one more heist: cracking the supposedly impregnable underwater vault operated by the aristocratic and decadent Harry (James Fox). The long middle part of the film concerns Don's scare tactics, designed to bully Gal back into crime and terrorize Jackie and Aitch. He humiliates DeeDee (who doesn't scare easily) with ugly references to her unchaste past, and Jackie with gloating mentions of when he used to have his way with her.

Don's dominance is much less physical than verbal and psychological-or symbolic. Thus he deliberately finishes urinating outside his host's toilet bowl, or uses his ramrod-stiff body to lunge diagonally, like a falling plank, at Gal, several times in rapid succession, stopping just short of actual contact. And the clever director, Jonathan Glazer, shoots this from a certain distance and from such an angle that Don, at first outside the frame and invisible, keeps hurtling into it, not unlike that initial boulder.

Glazer, whose background is in commercials and music videos, directs with great skill and originality. He has learned how to convey a strong message with utmost concision (commercials), and how to get elaborately choreographed movement into a spontaneous-seeming shot (music videos). Here he works wonders. He shoots from odd, disorienting, emotionally loaded angles; he places four or five persons within a shot in quaint, stylized, but highly expressive positions; he keeps the nearest head in blurry closeup, with others at lesser or greater distance, so as to convey depth of field; he cuts profusely and adroitly, often leaving us deprived of establishing shots and thus anxious, uncertain; he varies his tempos cunningly; and he uses light or its lack to disturbingly vivid effect, as when Teddy's carnivorous teeth shine out of the surrounding shadows, or the mere white of an ominous eye glistens in the dark.

One huge miscalculation is showing us Gal's nightmares, which involve some grotesque, hairy, and horned monster making mischief, right out of a second-rate horror movie. It may also be that crosscutting the heist in London with a previous murder in Spain, merely hinted at before, creates needless confusion rather than doubled suspense. Yet you must admire a director who stages Don's arrival at a Spanish airport by introducing the bald, skinny little fellow in a rear tracking shot, which the able Ben Kingsley, acting with his swinging shoulders and arrogantly jaunty walk, manages to imbue with consummate menace.

Kingsley gives us the ultimate psychopath in look, speech, and demeanor, the like of which we haven't seen since Robert Mitchum's performance in The Night of the Hunter. By injecting a sneering humor into his beastliness, he makes it, perhaps not sexier, but surely more frightening. Opposite him, Ray Winstone's Gal is his very antithesis: a big, quasi-somnolent hippo, slowly reacting to the tauntings of an unpredictable wolverine, but suggesting that it, too, can throw its weight around when aroused.