Seven Psychopaths (2012)

Martin McDonagh has collaborated with actor Colin Farrell for a second time after their critical and financial success working together in In Bruges with a movie called Seven Psychopaths. It is a motion picture I cannot compare to any other. As such, it is one of the most enjoyable movies I’ve seen anytime recently. I usually spend the year craving something different in my movies, but when one like this comes along, it is worth the wait. Like In Bruges, this movie is a comedy that could just as easily be called a drama. It is often hilarious and regularly moving and surprisingly profound and endlessly original. Colin Farrell, Sam Rockwell, Woody Harrelson and Christopher Walken are featured among a group of really nutty characters who do and say things that should seem absurd and are probably offensive, but which come across as charming. I’ve seen the movie twice now and I still don’t know why it works so well, but, by golly, it does.

It would be pointless to describe the plot. It is supposedly about seven psychopaths. I’m not sure which of the many characters the title refers to, but by my count, there are either more or less than seven.  Rockwell and Walken’s characters make a living kidnapping wealthy people’s dogs, returning them and collecting the large rewards. They seem to be making a good return until they kidnap Harrelson’s Shih Tzu. He’s a gangster of some sort, you see, and he’ll stop at nothing to get his dog back. Farrell gets wrapped up in all this while trying to write a screenplay for a movie called Seven Psychopaths. Some of the scenes in this movie may or may not be actually taking place in that movie, and sometimes the characters and situations from both intermingle. Within the logic of the film, it all makes perfect sense. The performances reach a zany perfection made all the better by Farrell playing his role as relatively normal.  This is the type of picture I imagine should be described as “modern screwball.” If Howard Hawkes had made Bringing Up Baby today, it would have turned out like this.

Martin McDonagh’s two movies are equally delightful. The former playwright apparently has a knack for creating films that rise above those pesky genre labels and have a little of everything to offer. Seven Psychopaths is a self-aware parody of popular film in general, poking a finger at its own implausibilities, but never giving them a second thought. A stylistic world of comedy chaos and alarming poignancy, this is a movie that wraps lunacy up in a serious face and convinces us to love it. It is positively loaded with surprises, even for someone who’s seen just about everything Hollywood’s thrown at us, including parodies. The short of it is that I loved this movie and consider it one of the highlights of current cinema. It’s just such a rare pleasure to see a modern comedy that isn’t stale and forgettable.

10/10