Trouble in Paradise

Suddenly we feel a pang of suffocation absorb the table while the surrounding restaurant continues its bustling activity. Winstone displays such a visceral (but controlled) despair that you can see him mentally trying to claw his way out of this new reality. The way his eyes dart around like he’s literally seeing everything he’s worked for crumble in front of him, the bobbing back and forth of his head as he weighs up the gravity of what he’s been told, the fruitless questions he asks to try and make sense of it. He essentially goes through a brilliantly accelerated “stages of grief” all while taking a brief moment to enjoy a first sip of beer as if it’s his last. “Oohh that’s good, nice and cold” he says, pacifying himself with a taste of respite from this horrible news, a tiny return to the life he’d become accustomed to that’s now ready to slip through his fingers. Despite all this, he still decides to get the calamari.

It’s a brilliantly crafted promise from Glazer that he’s going to walk you through what will be a most certain nightmare, step by agonising step.

It also establishes Sexy Beast as a gangster film intent on exploring the honest practicality of consorting with psychopathic animals when you are, for lack of a better term, normal. Gal is just a bloke, an underworld “grafter” so to speak. He wasn’t about rising the ranks, he was about the money and the rush. He was clearly very good at what he did but after a nine year stint in prison, he was done. Those animals I previously mentioned are never done after time inside, they’ll go right back into prison the next day if they have to and they expect the same of the “Gal’s” in their world. But if you are a “Gal”, how do you reason with that logic? What amount of money is worth that hopeless fight?

Which brings us to perhaps one of the most fascinating gangster/mob conventions of all. The imperviousness to the word “no.” Why is this so compelling? Why do we love watching these monsters refuse to back down from a polite decline? That look on their face when they hear it, almost as if they’re insulted more by the politeness than the knock back itself. Why does that never get old? Even with all the empathetic intelligence us “normies” are raised to conduct ourselves with there’s no doubt there are scenarios where this affront to social tippy toeing can appear tantalising. When a plumber tells you they can’t come at 8am, even though you’ve explained that’s the only window you have before leaving for work, followed by them giving you the “sometime between 9 and 3” routine, it would be nice to be able to say, with calm but explicit force: “I don’t think you understand… you’ll be here at 8.”

Where Don Logan (Sir Ben Kingsley) turns this motif on its head is the complete lack of artifice or game in his tactic, if you can even use the word “tactic” to describe his approach. This is NOT your calculating, snake charmer of a criminal. No manipulative silver tongue, no witty banter, no PITCH at all really. Rejection is not a prompt for him to try a different tack since there’s barely a tack to begin with. And it gets so much WORSE than that!

Sucking the energy out of a room and the people unfortunate enough to occupy it is a way of life for him. Alleviating discomfort is for us, it’s what WE have to do. Much like how honouring the word “no” is for the plebs, providing a modicum of human grace to a given social setting is a waste of his energy and time. This isn’t for any personal malevolent game, there is no “joy” that Don gets out of being this way since he barely even seems to notice the effect he has.

Don arrives at Gal’s gorgeous Spanish villa with a perfectly delivered “…my shirt’s sticking to me, I’m sweating like a cunt” to share the skinny on an ingenious heist he’s got going back in London. Teddy Bass (a terrifying Ian Mcshane), the big dog on top has a new game cooking, the most ambitious and impossible one yet, and Don doesn’t spare Gal an ounce of the gory details. This wild yarn isn’t just for shits and giggles however, Don is there to recruit Gal. But Gal is retired.

The moment of truth is here, all time for stalling has expired. Gal, practically trembling but unwavering in his goal, meekly delivers:

And with that sentence a brutal and endlessly maddening war of wills kicks off that would defeat even your most resilient horror film protagonist.

Don Logan is one of the great creations in British gangster cinema, the kind of basket lesser films would put all their fruit in, but thankfully Glazer is not interested in resting on such a laurel (wait till we get to McShane). Still, the 5 '5 Kingsley towers over everyone in each scene as a stupefyingly vile, hateful sod with a laser focus on grinding down this “unearned” peace, again not because he really enjoys it but because he just… does.

Sexy Beast is a film of fluctuating speeds and technique that makes it a somewhat disorienting (but exuberant) watch. The film opens with a baffling, fatalistic omen involving a runaway boulder, followed by a rabbit hunt in the desert that takes on its own, less than subtle, metaphorical significance. Meanwhile the macguffin of the piece: the big heist, lays out its insane backstory, colourful players and intricate machinations with the elaborate, quick-cut panache of a Guy Ritchie film. However all these shifts in style and narrative focus, not to mention splashes of haunting imagery, all buttress a stark, relentlessly tense and stripped down domestic chamber piece where Glazer smartly steps back and lets the uncomfortably raw vigour breathe.

Don knows all these people from the “good old days” and proceeds to hold them all hostage while they gallantly play out an absurd show of hospitality, a gesture he barely seems to comprehend. Julianne White as Jackie looks utterly broken having to be present for this abhorrent pustule of a man while her husband Aitch misguidedly attempts to placate him. Cavan Kendall (who sadly passed away before the film was released) is delightfully spineless as Aitch, knowing full well what Don is capable of but at the same time not realising that his sniveling sidekick routine just makes him all the more repugnant in his eyes. Then there’s Deedee, the woman Gal loves with all his heart, played with a piquant, ravishing mettle by Amanda Redman. Like everyone else, she’s scared of Don, but is infinitely more set on bombarding him with the resolve that they’re not giving up their peace without a fight. While Gal is saying “No”, Deedee is exuding “No”, she positively SCREAMS it with her eyes and Don knows from jump street that in order to get to Gal he has to get through her first.

The sheer agony of this situation is summed up with one brief shot depicting Gal, Deedee, Aitch and Jackie holed up in the kitchen. The characters look hopeless, the lighting has a poisonous hue and their voices are weak in tone. It resembles those post-apocalypse scenes where the cast takes a “breather” to formulate a way out of their torment. At this point I want to repeat that this is all happening, on paper, under the societal arrangement of an “old colleague from out of town staying over.”

Again, Don doesn’t grasp the askew circumstances of his visit, this demented form of reverse Stockholm Syndrome is all just a vehicle for him to wear down Gal, batting away his refusals like a fly, occasionally veering off into pure psychological warfare before inevitably circling back to this job he needs him for. A cycle that soon starts to break Gal’s brain.

“This is madness” Gal sputters out in a particularly vicious scene where Don matter of factly lets the bile flow, verbally obliterating his loved ones and decrying his comfortable existence. There’s a point where we’re thinking “just do the job” so this will all end. Then we quickly remember that there would be no “end”, there would be another job after that, and another and another. He can’t give in even if it means never waking up from this horrifying dream.

Gal’s need to stick to his guns takes on a whole new dimension once he’s reunited with the cold and imposing Teddy Bass, the man behind the mission. As a formidable underworld figure who rubs shoulders with London’s elite while conspiring to fleece the bejesus out of them, Ian Mcshane brings a more composed brand of horror to the proceedings. Brilliantly contrasting the brutish and unhinged Kingsley, it’s here that we are presented with the kind of question only someone in Gal’s situation would ever have to ponder: Who’s more terrifying? The unstable, quick to anger, rabid dog that can’t be reasoned with? Or the calm, measured, but utterly ruthless “gentlemen” gangster who knows you’re lying to him?

The criminally underrated Ray Winstone didn’t have an easy job in this picture and Gal Dove represents quite possibly his best work. As a hulking British bulldog of a man, this film’s “against type” methodology gave him an interesting challenge in playing timid and emotionally battered to a man less than half his size. As the actor himself opined in interviews, Gal is a “lover.” He elegantly balances that gruff, ex-con, East End edge with an authentic loveable teddy bear essence. He’s not of that world despite fitting perfectly into, and for a time, enjoying the hell out of it. When you talk about good kids getting mixed up with the wrong crowd you wouldn’t be far off singling out Gal as a possible poster boy. The way Winstone makes you feel for him as he gets mercilessly whittled down by Kingsley, despite the unmistakable dynamics in physique, is such a refreshing instinct where it would be too tempting (and easy) to play, even a slightly submissive breed, of “hard”.

Written with a precise, rhythmic polish by Louis Mellis and David Scinto, Sexy Beast is about as vehemently eccentric a gangster film as you could imagine and this is on the heels of a decade that was not exactly barren of pictures with such designs (remember all those Tarantino knock-offs?). As a crime saga, a black comedy, a heist movie and a love story, the screenplay doesn’t shy away from getting in the audience’s face with these dissimilar tones but also balances them with a fluid, swift elegance. The sophistication of the material is not lost on its cast who clearly, when you step back as a viewer, are aware they are working on something truly special, giving the picture everything they have and sizing up every acting instinct with the utmost scrutiny.

Sexy Beast hasn’t lost an ounce of what initially made it such a pervasive cult item of the early 2000’s. A rich, effervescent and carefully sculpted actor's piece disguised as a bit of British underworld pulp, it remains one of those films that people just love to talk about. While Jonathan Glazer’s four films (to date) all have proven to be tinder boxes for passionate analysis, there is just something about this film that stands above them all in that particular context, even if it’s arguably not his most conceptually dense work.

It’s definitely his most “fun” film, that much is for sure, and on that strength alone it's essentially impossible to not recommend revisiting it, enjoying how fresh it still feels and then jumping into a bountiful gab session with your film loving friends. So go ahead, dissect the ferocious performances, the relentless tension, the subtext behind its more mystifying touches and last but certainly not least … Why the fuck is it called Sexy Beast?