The Guard: a wee winner from the other McDonagh

“I can’t tell if you’re really motherfucking dumb,” says FBI Agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle) to Galway Garda Sergeant Gerry Boyle (Brendan Gleeson), “or really motherfucking smart.” Perhaps a little too on the nose, this line, but it’s handled exceedingly well, coming at the tail of a fuss-free, beautifully written and realized little scene somewhere in the first third of writer/director John Michael McDonagh’s The Guard. Just two cops from very different backgrounds nestled in a car, at night, traversing the lonesome and weatherbeaten Irish countryside and sussing each other out. Well, okay, it’s really only Everett that does any detectible sussing, since Boyle never seems to be working too hard at anything.

On the surface, the corpulent, middle-aged Boyle seems the epitome of cynicism, laziness and corruption. (An opening scene I’ll refrain from spoiling wastes no time in establishing Boyle’s ethical negligence.) He is also a regular fountain of racist slurs, delivering one after another in airtight deadpan directly to his new-in-town African-American colleague from their very first exchange on. He tells tall tales, solicits prostitutes and is not adverse to appropriating evidence. Yet he seems to be be listening carefully to things, and is often one step ahead of everyone else. Which is to say that Boyle is a bit like Colombo meets the Bad Lieutenant. He goes out of his way to make it easy to underestimate him, but maintains a most peculiar, and perhaps uniquely Gaelic, sense of personal integrity.

McDonagh is the brother of Martin McDonagh, who wrote and directed the beloved black comedy In Bruges, which also featured Gleeson prominently. The Guard is looser and has less overt thematic gravity than In Bruges, and, initially at least, seems to ascribe to an ever more aggressively audacious brand of humour—a punk little brother of a movie from the punk little brother of an established playwright and filmmaker. But I like The Guard better. Perhaps it surprised me more. Perhaps it gave itself more room to make discoveries about its all-too-easily dismissable antihero. It’s intricate murder mystery/international drug trafficking plot gives it a nice anchor, but this crime-based framework—which supplies the terrific British character actor Mark Strong with another great little role as an absurdly philosophical bad guy—is essentially a beard for a highly irreverent character study.

The Guard also has its perfectly selected unlikely buddy leads going for it. Gleeson was born to embody precisely this kind of shrugged-off complexity, and Cheadle brings so much more texture and alertness to his role than most actors would deem necessary. He understands that he’s at once the audience’s surrogate, intermittently offended and genuinely uncertain as to what to make of Gleeson, and a unique character with his own understated backstory and reasons for being where he is, doing the things he’s doing. Why after all these years Cheadle isn’t a full-on American movie star I’ll never understand.

Didactic, sure, but not completely dumb: Traitor engages with the enemy

The brief prelude is set in Sudan, 1978, and conveys an essential bit of exposition: a child witnesses his father get blown to bits in a car bombing. As the camera holds on the child’s shocked face we transit to present-day Yemen, where the story proper begins and that child is now a man named Samir Horn (co-producer Don Cheadle) who, in a bold bit of dramatic irony, is now selling explosives to Islamic terrorists. What’s interesting in this is that Samir’s childhood trauma is actually mentioned in later scenes, which calls into question whether or not we needed to actually see the event, arguably one more spectacular and emotionally fraught moment in a movie stuffed with them. But like a lot of thrillers, Traitor is very much about seeming, the sort of film in which what we see and what we’re told demand to be distinguished, both for the sake of tension and to deepen our understanding of it’s message, because, make no mistake, Traitor is also very much a message-laden film.

The term “didactic” is almost always used as a pejorative, and needn’t always be the case. Like Hotel Rwanda, another film that found Cheadle portraying an African-born protagonist in a desperate, topical situation, Traitor, helmed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff, is decidedly mainstream, its approach to storytelling and directorial style being well-crafted boilerplate. But it’s also the sort of film, like Hotel Rwanda, that wouldn’t mean much if it didn’t have the capacity to reach the largest possible audience. Based on a story by Steve Martin—yep, that Steve Martin—it’s told largely from the perspective of Samir, a devout Muslim with extensive military experience and expertise in explosives, who gradually joins up with Islamic terrorists. He’s not the first terrorist to be ostensibly empathized in movies, but he is the most identifiable, embodied in a beloved, charismatic Hollywood actor.

Samir has a parallel character in G-man Roy Clayton (Guy Pearce), a noble Southerner whose daddy was a minister, who majored in Islamic studies and who can quote the Koran at the drop of a hat. More capable than his fellow feds because of his understanding of the enemy, he’s at once Samir’s nemesis and ally. He’s also crucial to ramming home Traitor’s appeals for greater tolerance in times of crisis, with dialogue about how ineffective racial profiling is or overwrought lines like “Seems every religion has more than one face.” Clayton’s role as explicator for fundamentalist Islam’s seeming psychopathology is compromised by the fact that Samir, through no fault of the superb Cheadle, of whom we can only blame for being so likable, never fully convinces as a man who truly believes that the slaughter of innocent people—okay, “infidels”—is a admirable way to advance the cause of his people. But Traitor, as sly in certain respects as it is unsubtle, finds its ways of dealing with this problem, and by the time we become distracted by such contradictions Nachmanoff has shifting into high gear genre dynamics, stacking up reversals and building suspense sufficiently to keep us engaged. In any case it held my interest long enough for me to appreciate its particular ideological stance, even while it’s getting shoved down my throat.