Nicolas Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives
Only God Forgives is the story of a young American expatriate named Julian living in Bangkok that helps his family run a Muay Thai club to front a large drug smuggling operation along with his brother and mother, who is the frontrunner of the operation. When Julian’s older brother, Billy, rapes and murders an under-age prostitute and is allowed to be beaten to death by order of a local police Lieutenant who considers himself a righteous mediator to maintain moral balance under brutal means, Julian is ordered by his mother to find Lt. Chang and kill him.
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect of this going in. Having seen (and loved, perhaps my favourite of 2011) Refn’s previous film “Drive” I was under the impression that this would fall short in it’s footsteps, not delivering on the similar film-making style that made the former so great. In a way I feel that I was correct, however it’s not quite as cut and dry as I would have liked. This movie was like Drive and unlike Drive to some incredibly quick shifting extremes.
While it retains the very arty idea of cut dialogue and the “cool”, stylistic demeanour of close-up facial shots under periods of intense silence (and does this a hell of a lot more than Drive, way past it’s point of diminishing returns) that are also gradually interlaced with scenes of incredible violence and gore towards the end, it is also far more surreal and dream-like in it’s narrative and the way the story/characters are played out on-screen.
I enjoyed the silent moments of Drive, Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan’s characters in particular, because they are set up in such a way where their personalities and internal monologues would allow them to reason that silence is their best recourse under that situation, and in a very subtle way offers a unique reflection of the characters and a rewarding hint as to the depth of their character on the circumstances that they are left facing at any particular moment, I felt none of that with Only God Forgives.
In Drive, a few of the characters are incredibly awkward while the rest remain largely socially intact and capable of normal interaction, whereas here the design is flipped, with only a few characters ever really exhibiting any kind of conformity to the norm and the rest pacing around in the same awkward manner as the Driver from Drive, but with no appreciable understanding as to why.
The only person in the entire movie that displayed any particular sense of “normal” behaviour was Crystal (Julian’s mother) played by Kristin Scott Thomas, and due to that was perhaps the most memorable and impressive performance of the movie, which is not saying all too much for the way her character is written outside of that. Gosling and most of the rest of the cast were left with a mumbling, stoic moodiness that is built on shaky foundations that offer no real pleasantries in their actions during the events of the movie, most of the characters have no real “character” at all.
And while having seen it once around and at least knowing a little more of the character back-story, I expect a second viewing would serve little more than what I’ve already seen and understand of Refn’s intent.
The story itself may have shown some promise in it’s plotting, but the idea to take this beyond a straightforward situational study and into a metaphysical dream-state insight into morality left Only God Forgives with a façade of cloudiness and mysticism that was more an ordeal to dig through than a joy. This is a movie that will leave you with a lot of questions and very few answers, and not at all in the way that you’d like.
While I can respect a cloudy narrative if it allows the audience to come to their own conclusions on how they interpret the themes laid out by the director, Only God Forgives left me with a sense that what I took from the movie was not so much an enlightening view of moral righteousness and the price paid for reckless evil, but Refn’s view of moral righteousness and the price paid for reckless evil.
Under the guise of something that offers infinite branching paths to how a person may view it’s story, Only God Forgives is really just an artistic showing of horrible and malicious human tendencies (that border frequently in the extremes) that hopes people will be open-minded enough to invent something up themselves to fill it’s blatant gaps. While I can see the themes that Refn was trying to get across, I felt a strong disconnect with how he made them appear and how he could have made them appear efficiently.
If I do have my reservations about everything else, at the very least I enjoyed the cinematography and thought that the set pieces were wonderfully creative, favouring dim purple lighting in amongst a room of expensive decorum, but also showing the more budget-stricken Thai slums and market streets, with the violence largely reflecting itself well amongst the area it takes place in.
The arguably more “elegant” and meticulous violence taking place in rooms of extreme detail and flair; and the grittier, more impetuous violence taking place in the broken down slums and grease-ridden street corners. While I expect that Refn’s interpretation of Thailand is too close to the stereotype than the reality, I allowed myself to really take in the locations and appreciate them for what they were. Though I maintain that if the wallpapers and chandeliers were what pleased me most about the movie, then it was left with a lot more important things that it failed to deliver on.
Among the many themes of morality and vengeance that this movie holds onto, which I can appreciate under worthy portrayals, it also delves into a mundane and graceless expression of Oedipal tendencies and moody sibling rivalry that I could only ever really be cynical about.
It seems Refn wanted so much to shock his audience with what they would see and hear that he thought slipping in a disgusting background for the character relations (largely unexplored in the movie, and definitely not to whatever potential it may have shown) was enough to explain their personality type, which, when reflecting back on the movie, makes not a modicum of sense.
While there are some metaphors of the abolishment of sin under the eyes of “God” and the price paid for resolution, also the portrayal of the hands as a means of destruction and malevolence and how that plays out that I really enjoyed, the rest felt empty to me and depressingly unfulfilled.
I was altogether disappointed with Only God Forgives, and while I didn’t expect it to live up to Refn’s best efforts, I didn’t expect it to be so shamelessly droll either. At no point was I too bored with it to quit outright, but never was I stricken with awe or left with any appreciation of worth for the movie and it’s situational storytelling capabilities, just with a handful of sweeping questions and no creative answers to wash them away.
I may come back to see this in the future, because there’s a huge part of me that feels I’m missing a lot about the movie that I haven’t caught the first time around, and I’m looking forward to any opinions that oppose mine and what people on the other end of the spectrum may have taken from this, if anyone that has seen it were willing to offer up discussion, I would feel all the better for that. However the most important thing to realise about this is that even though it may look/smell/taste like Drive, it is not Drive, and from what I took from it, it never will be.
