In Bruges
by Martin McDonagh
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Ann Elsley, Brendan Gleeson, Colin Farrell, Mark Donovan, Ralph FiennesDirector: Martin McDonagh
Brand: Universal Studios
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1; German (Original Language); French (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 5.1
Format: AC-3, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 107 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2008-06-24
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Universal Studios
Product features:
- Condition: New
- Format: DVD
- AC-3; Color; Dolby; Dubbed; DVD; Subtitled; Widescreen; NTSC
Movie Reviews of In Bruges
Movie Review: Too subtle for dark comedy
Summary: 5 Stars
Yes, In Bruges has funny moments, and, yes, In Bruges has dark overtones. But, no, In Bruges is not a dark comedy. To label it so is to sell the film short. Dark comedies rely too heavily on caricature (and thus distortion) to reach the depth of insight that In Bruges offers. This film mercilessly forces us to confront a basic irony of human life: that people are simultaneously conscientious and cold-blooded. The sole source of humor in the film is simply that ironies, regardless of their contradictory content, can be inexplicably funny on their own. Director and writer Martin McDonagh is modest enough to let the irony speak for itself rather than blow it out of proportion.
The irony frames the dilemmas of the two hit men and their boss. Ken (the veteran hit man and father-figure to his partner Ray) has realized the emptiness and selfishness of his life and strives to connect himself to a higher purpose in two ways. First, he opens himself to the sweep of human history as he finds it in the art and architecture of a quintessentially historic European town. For Ken, Bruges is not a tourist trap but a record of the human hope and suffering that precedes him and carries on through him. Second, he aims to give his partner Ray (the novice hit man) the chance of redemption that he himself has lost.
The irony is brought into full relief at the very moment at the playground when Ken opts against assassinating Ray despite Harry's orders. Instead, he prevents Ray from committing suicide for his guilt for accidently killing a young boy while he brutally murdered a priest. Some of the film's funniest (i.e. most ironic) lines are delivered when Harry (the boss) summarizes the botched suicide as Ken told it to him: "Let me get this straight. He [Ray] would have solved his problem, your problem, and my problem, but you stopped him from doing it?" Ken intervened on the grounds that Ray cannot help any other boy in this world if he were dead.
The irony works on different levels for Ray. Most obviously, he realizes the fallacy of his reckless ways as a result of the boy's death and struggles to find redemption. More compellingly, however, it comes out in banal (and admittedly funny) ways throughout the film. For example, he actually seems sincere when tells Eirik (Chloë's ex-boyfriend) at the most intense moment of their fight that a knife isn't going to help while he himself is holding a gun. In another example, Ray is viciously rude to the obese American tourist but he still seems genuine when he advises the tourist against climbing the staircase up the bell tower given his weight. Strangely, Ray's flashes of empathy rule out labeling him a savage even if he is clearly a murderer.
For Harry, the irony manifests itself in his strict commitment to principles. As the least merciful of the trio, even Harry confirms that if he ever killed a young boy, accidentally or not, then he would stick the gun in his mouth and blow his own head off. With a mysteriously humorous impact, Harry scoffs at Ken's sympathy for Ray as a sadly suicidal young man: "I'm suicidal! Everyone is f---ing suicidal! The point is to do it!"
Indeed, Harry sticks to his principles and does it in the end. Why? NOT because he killed a young boy, which was the reason he cited for a justifiable suicide. Harry unpredictably does not commit suicide for any act that he did, but rather for an act that he prevented from happening. That act was Ray's own redemption for killing the young boy. Now that Harry murdered Ray, the latter was no longer capable of improving the life of a living boy as Ken told him he must to atone for his killing of the original boy. We thus learn that redemption for a cold-blooded killing is not achieved by performing the same act on one's self. Lives are not commodities in an equivalency exchange. Rather, redemption is the never-ending effort to improve the welfare of others, an effort that cannot be undertaken in death.
Harry half-way realizes this point when he sees Ray, half-dead, crawling over to Ken, nearly dead also from Harry's gun. Harry says, "Oh, so this is what it's all about." He does not fully get the point, however, because he puts his gun in his mouth and coldly says "You got to stick to your principles." In doing so, Harry must have felt responsible for the boy's killing even though he did not participate in it. The question is why would he feel this way. On some level, he must have realized that by preventing Ray's redemption - in the form of improving another boy's life - he himself was effectively worsening some other boy's life and so must die. However, Ray very much learns that suicide is not a path to redemption. His last consciously spoken words implore Harry NOT "to do it" as if to tell him so. Harry ignores Ray and there was nothing funny about that.
Summary of In Bruges
IN BRUGES - DVD MovieThe considerable pleasures of In Bruges begin with its title, which suggests a glumly self-important art film but actually fits a rattling-good tale of two Irish gangsters "keepin' a low profile" after a murder gone messily wrong. Bruges, the best-preserved medieval town in Belgium, is where the bearlike veteran Ken (Brendan Gleeson) and newbie triggerman Ray (Colin Farrell) have been ordered by their London boss to hole up for two weeks. As the sly narrative unfolds like a paper flower in water, "in Bruges" also becomes a state of mind, a suspended moment amid centuries-old towers and bridges and canals when even thuggish lives might experience a change in direction. And throughout, the viewer has ample opportunity to consider whose pronunciation of "Bruges" is more endearing, Gleeson's or Farrell's. The movie marks the feature writing-directing debut of playwright Martin McDonagh, whose droll meditation on sudden mortality, Six Shooter, copped the 2005 Oscar for best live-action short. Although McDonagh clearly relishes the musicality of his boyos' brogue and has written them plenty of entertaining dialogue, In Bruges is no stageplay disguised as a film. The script is deceptively casual, allowing for digressions on the newly united and briskly thriving Europe, and annexing passers-by as characters who have a way of circling back into the story with unanticipatable consequences. That includes a film crew--shooting a movie featuring, to Ray's fascination, "a midget" (Jordan Prentice)--and a fetching blond production assistant (Clémence Poésy) whose job description keeps evolving. There's one other key figure: Harry, the Cockney gang boss whose omnipotence remains unquestioned as long as he remains offscreen, back in England, as if floating in an early Harold Pinter play. Harry has reasons inextricably tender and perverse for selecting Bruges as his hirelings' destination, and eventually he emerges from the aether to express them--first as a garrulous telephone voice and then in the volatile form of Ralph Fiennes. By that point the charmed moment of suspension, already shaken by several irruptions of violence, is pretty well doomed. But In Bruges continues to surprise and satisfy right up to the end. --Richard T. Jameson
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