Sexy Beast
With Ray Winstone, Amanda Redman, Ben Kingsley, Cavan Kendall, Julianne White, and Ian McShane.
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The past stalks the crime film genre too: little has changed over the years, as plots are laid out before an audience increasingly well versed in connecting the dots. Perhaps the last great crime film was John Boorman’s Point Blank, which was released in 1967. The story was fairly straightforward, but it was told compellingly, playing with our sense of time. Lee Marvin is Walker, an angry ex-con who has been betrayed by his wife and best friend and cheated out of the heist money that landed him in prison. With pathological single-mindedness, Walker pursues everyone who double-crossed him, and the attempt to recover his loot becomes increasingly absurd. Boorman’s frenzied, shifting narrative mirrors Walker’s driven, highly subjective state of mind. As the story progresses, people advise Walker to let go of the past, but that’s beyond him–the past is all he has left. The present becomes an increasingly narrow series of choices fraught with chaos and danger.
Both films are also darkly comic, though Point Blank is more socially pungent, offering a darkly scathing indictment of corporate America, where crooks are indistinguishable from so-called legitimate businessmen. Sexy Beast’s main chuckles come from Logan’s endlessly resourceful expression of his rage and inner turmoil. Fundamentally incapable of getting along with anyone, he is reminiscent of a Warner Brothers cartoon villain in his unchecked hubris (think of the Tasmanian Devil or Yosemite Sam). In the hands of a skilled actor like Kingsley this makes for good theater; the downside is that we never feel that Glazer and writers Louis Mellis and David Scinto have created a believable character with any human scale.
In December, the Music Box will be showing Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders, which, like Point Blank, is one of the last great crime films, daring to reimagine the genre by reworking its various elements into something that’s both thought provoking and highly entertaining. It’s too much to ask that every foray into a well-worn genre yield something new and innovative, and perhaps we should be grateful for modest pleasures like Sexy Beast, which are at least competent in achieving their limited goals. Yet hidden among those recent British crime films may be one that resonates as fresh and exciting. If so, here’s hoping that it eventually makes it over here. In the meantime, Band of Outsiders will do just fine.
