The Second Coming of McDonagh

Martin McDonagh Finds His Inner Thug as Film Director

By CARYN JAMES
Published: April 4, 2006

The idea is a Hollywood cliché, a danger sign, and even the benign
punch line to a Mother Teresa joke: "What I really want to do is
direct." (What did she say when St. Peter offered her whatever she
wished?) In his rare interviews, the playwright Martin McDonagh has
insistently sounded like that joke, making it clear that he is a child
of the movies, a playwright by default despite his brilliant career.
Well, it turns out that he's right.

His first film, "Six Shooter," recently won the Oscar for best
live-action short, which would be meaningless if the film weren't so
eloquent and comic, shaped by a sophisticated cinematic imagination.
In 27 minutes, the film follows a man named Donnelly (Brendan
Gleeson), whose wife has just died, on an increasingly bizarre train
ride in Ireland. He meets a young couple whose infant has also just
died, and a nameless young man ? called Kid in the credits, as in an
old western movie -- with a warped sense of humor and an explosive
secret. With the black comedy and bloody violence of Mr. McDonagh's
plays (like his best, "The Pillowman"), the film follows his typical
pattern, in which a genuine tragedy gradually becomes less realistic
yet more emotionally wrenching.

The influence of filmmakers who turn violence into art, like Martin
Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, has always been evident in Mr.
McDonagh's plays and public comments. "Six Shooter" highlights how
that violence, so striking and fresh when transplanted to the stage,
finds a natural, if less startling, home on screen.

Luckily, viewers are able to discover this for themselves, because
"Six Shooter" can be downloaded from iTunes, making it available to a
wider audience than is ever likely to see a McDonagh play. (The film
is at iTunes.com under the rubric "Shorts International" for $1.99. In
addition, Magnolia Pictures' compilation of the live and animated
shorts nominated for 2005 Oscars is playing in a handful of cities and
will be on DVD this summer.)

As it happens, Mr. McDonagh's stage violence is especially apparent in
the current "Lieutenant of Inishmore," his blood-splattered and highly
entertaining farce depicting Irish political terrorists as ruthless,
bumbling idiots. ("Inishmore" runs through Sunday at the Atlantic
Theater Company, then on April 18 begins previews for its Broadway
opening.)

The same playfully dark humor that dominates "Inishmore" becomes the
undertone in "Six Shooter." When the Kid is told that the young
couple's child has died, he asks, "Did they kill it?" in a perfect
deadpan delivery. "I'm surprised mams and dads don't kill their kids
more often," he goes on. "Like Marvin Gaye's dad."

The theme of murdering your closest relatives echoes through Mr.
McDonagh's plays, most prominently in "The Beauty Queen of Leenane,"
in which a daughter kills her own mam with a poker. Matricide plays a
part in "Six Shooter," too. Deaths and accounts of deaths accumulate
on the brief journey until the film seems to be set on some "Twilight
Zone" train of death.

"My mam got murdered last night," the Kid says. We have no reason to
believe him or ? because this is a McDonagh work ? disbelieve him.
When Donnelly observes that he doesn't seem upset, the Kid answers,
"Well, she wasn't the most pleasant of women, I'm sure life goes on,"
taking his place in a long line of droll, parent-hating McDonagh
characters.

Such perfectly modulated comic dialogue doesn't need to be adjusted
for a different genre, but there was no guarantee that Mr. McDonagh
could direct actors so well. The performances here are uniformly
smooth and suited to the film's tone, taking a realistic approach to
absurd situations.

It must help that his stage and screen actors, so attuned to Mr.
McDonagh's rhythms, sometimes overlap. David Wilmot, who is the
sensitive, grieving young father in "Six Shooter," plays Padraic, the
title character in "The Lieutenant of Inishmore," a man so crazily
violent that the I.R.A. rejected him. And Domhnall Gleeson (Brendan
Gleeson's son) plays a central character in "Inishmore" who fears what
Padraic might do when he learns that his beloved cat is dead, and has
a tiny role as a cafe-car waiter in "Six Shooter." Mr. McDonagh has
expressed his admiration for Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in their
tough-guy roles: insensitive, trigger-happy thugs like the Kid and
Padraic are as thoughtlessly violent as Johnny Boy, the De Niro
character in "Mean Streets."

Stage violence, though, is far less realistic than what can be managed
on screen. That concept is counterintuitive: shouldn't it be more
alarming to have a flesh-and-blood actor murdered before your eyes?
But the theater audience is always aware that the actor suspended
upside down in a torture scene in "Inishmore" is simply displaying
impressive physical stamina. The blood-substitute that floods the
stage near the play's end is gruesome and extreme, but would be
routine and more believable in a movie.

Oddly, the violence is "Six Shooter" (and it does, inevitably, happen)
is almost as cartoonish as it is in "Inishmore." When someone is shot,
blood spurts out of the bulletholes in obviously fake streams, as
conspicuous as those imperfect illusions in old movies. The falseness
may be deliberate, especially in a film called "Six Shooter," in which
a character draws pistols with both hands like a movie gunslinger. But
the approach is jarring because the film is not cartoonish. (There is
an exploding cow, but that episode enacts an over-the-top story the
Kid tells.)

The schematic violence doesn't detract from the film's overall
achievement, though, or from Mr. Gleeson's subtle performance, which
is at its most touching and realistic after the deadly shootout.
Without words, he conveys a sense of too much death and violence all
around him.

It is well known that Mr. McDonagh wrote all his plays, in some
version or other, in a great burst in the mid-90's, and has reworked
them but not offered any entirely new ones since. He has, however,
signed on to write and direct a film for Focus Features called "In
Bruges," about two British hit men who escape to Belgium. Theatergoers
may be in mourning, but "Six Shooter" sends a wonderfully hopeful
signal about Mr. McDonagh's second ? or was it his first? ? calling. 





 
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