Sexy Beast

Sexy Beast

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Movie Reviews of Sexy Beast

Movie Review: Trouble in Paradise
Summary: 5 Stars

Two overlapping pink hearts, candy-shaped, feature in mosaic at the bottom of the perfect blue pool. These are the kind of hearts that, like tiki torches and umbrella-laden drinks, suddenly look agreeable, even touching, and so deeply right in a tropical setting. Totally tasteless and totally sincere. No impoverished labourers created that mosaic, no: those hearts are made of pure love.

The body looks edible, tenderized, like a slab of medium-rare steak. The slicked-back hair is a glorious honey blond, striped with white. The body is doughy and middle-aged but still lushly beautiful, tanned the ridiculous mahogany of vacationing Englishmen. It is covered only with tiny yellow Speedo briefs. The body can barely rouse itself to deliver a rapturous monologue on its pleasures.

Sun, semi-nudity, solitude. It's all right there on the surface. A vision of calming hedonism, of gorgeousness in exile on the Costa del Sol. The souped-up reggae of "Peaches" by the Stranglers is a perfect, cheerily insinuating soundtrack.

Gal Dove, retired Cockney gang member and burglar, is enjoying an eternal poolside junket in a world without melanoma. Reflecting on a former life in England, he mutters: "It's a dump. Don't make me laugh. What a toilet."

Gal clambers up from his white sun bed to appreciate his existence from a rare perspective of verticality. Suddenly, a massive boulder rolls without explanation down a nearby hill, just clears Gal's shoulder, and crashes into the perfect square pool, filling it almost completely and breaking the two hearts.

It feels all very Aesop's Fables, somehow.

That night, news arrives of the immanent descent of criminal middleman Don Logan from London to this Spanish paradise. Gal (Ray Winstone) lives with his beloved wife, former porn actress DeeDee, and two close friends from London, Aitch and Jackie. All wilt with fear at the mention of Logan's name; his arrival for an overnight visit brings new meaning to the term home invasion.

Logan is played by Ben Kingsley, best known in the title role of Richard Attenborough's "Gandhi". Both the casting and the performance are shocking, and here Kingsley brilliantly and easily earns his Oscar nomination.

Logan turns out to be a swami of ultra-violence, as spare as a shark: a rage-machine in a short-sleeved dress shirt and cheap flannel trousers. His bony, bumpy head, as he sits rigid in the back of a taxi, is bald, still. He is given to paranoid dialogues with the mirror in the dead of night, winding himself up until he literally kicks Gal out of bed. His speech is disturbingly speedy, and he has the habit of repeating the pigtails of sentences with brawling disbelief.

Previous collaborations with Logan in high-line robbery have already earned Gal nine years in prison. Logan, himself under pressure from decadent crime boss Teddy Bass, has come to recruit the unwilling Gal to empty the safety deposit boxes of a London bank, whose vault is billed as one of the most inaccessible in Europe. (The planned entry is fittingly swank: eight thugs will tunnel through the pool of a Turkish bath adjacent to the bank, creating an underwater ballet of snorkelling and welding gear.)

Gal's clean, spacious hacienda is instantly infused with claustrophobic tension and the atmosphere of domestic violence. Logan's momentary kindness (shot through with homoerotic yearning, as in his confession to Gal: "I love you. You are loveable. Big loveable bloke") only wrong-foot the audience, making the next assault sting all the more. "Dove the love," rhapsodizes Logan. "Glamorous Gal, big Gal. Gorgeous. You used to have a great body, great physique. Handsome." Logan pivots to invoke DeeDee's resume of old super-16 porn films: "Dear me. What a stain on your life. All the Persil in the world couldn't shift it. She's disgusting."

Don Logan won't take no for an answer. "Yes! Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes," he screams. Kingsley unleashes the black comedy in Logan's rage by playing him deadpan, implying Logan's ratty cunning, not Kingsley's irony.

Gal is a bullyboy no longer. He is touchingly devoted to his marriage and the simple pleasures of lounge lizardry. He acts as a father-figure to the local pool-boy. Appraising Gal's beefy, sun-blackened body, Logan hilariously spits out: "You should be ashamed of yourself. You look like f***ing Idi Amin."

Power is exerted through the criminal chain of command through sexual bullying. Teddy Bass is offered a crack at the bank's vaults by a suavely nude bank president at an orgy they both attend. Logan veers with terrifying arbitrariness from spasms of homophobia to hints at inconceivable violence. "That can all change," he threatens Jackie, remarking on her beauty. "You've got very nice eyes, DeeDee. Never noticed them before. They real?"

Prior to Don's arrival, Gal and Aitch take the pool-boy shooting, and comically fail to bring down the tiny bunny in their sites. Soon come dreams and hallucinations to haunt Gal featuring a giant, homicidal man-rabbit. Staged by debut film director Jonathan Glazer, these arty interludes have proven virtually impossible for critics to assimilate, though they are as successful as they are ambitious. Imagine Matthew Barney splicing the Manx iconography of "Cremaster 4" into a hybrid psychodrama-gangster film. The gun-wielding man-rabbit first appears an emblem of Don Logan, then of Teddy Bass, but later seems to signify dread itself.

Glazer finds a textured ensemble piece in a gangster film, and employs photography of exquisite quality. His keen formalist instinct enables him to subtly refract audio-visual effect through Gal's first rapturous, later panicky perspective. The verbal duels of Gal and Don are as captivating as a shoot-out, elevating what might have been a genre film to the status of art.

Summary of Sexy Beast

Kingsley's volatile performance--the polar opposite of his Oscar®-winning role in Gandhi--expands the actor's range into startlingly unexpected territory. It's the white-hot center of Sexy Beast, but the feature debut of director Jonathan Glazer (after acclaimed TV commercials and music videos) is equally noteworthy for the performance of the lesser-known Winstone, and also for Glazer's brass-knuckle approach to what is, essentially, a conventional gangland thriller. Glazer's instincts aren't always sound (dream sequences involving a hideous man-rabbit prove a bit too peculiar), but with pugilistic rhythm and a humorous knack for combining well-chosen songs and a rough, kinetic visual style, Sexy Beast is a wild ride. --Jeff Shannon.