Sidebar: In case you're wondering why the slightly offbeat title, consider it this way; if it'd been the nice, simple A Film A Day, that would mean that this would just end up being A FAD, and we don't want that.
Today's film - settle down at the back, there'll be questions later - is Layer Cake (Vaughn, 2004). Let's kick off with the trailer:
I'm not a gangster. I'm a businessman whose commodity happens to be cocaine.
I'll be the first to admit that the trailer is just that little bit strange, but then again, there's an argument to be made that so is the film.
Here's a brief history lesson; Michael Vaughn is an oddly fascinating career study, in film terms. Let's be totally honest; you can't separate, at least initially, Michael Vaughn from Guy Richie, because they were inseparably intertwined with the producer / director dyad for Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch.
Now, Guy Ritchie's career is an interesting study, but perhaps you could kind of guess the way things were going; after two initial successes, Ritchie had what we will charitably refer to as 'some wayward years''; I will stand up and defend Revolver if I was called upon to do so, because it's all kinds of fascinating, but even I would have trouble mounting a spirited defence for Swept Away. This was interesting on a personal level , because when I was a teenager - yes, yes, all those years ago, blah, blah,
Part of this was that I was able to have the questionable thrill of sneaking in to see it under-age; it was - and is - an 18-certificate film, and at the time, I was ineligible to see it, for obvious reasons. But thanks to a combination of a friend at the time with a car and a lax ticket seller, there was 'the thrill', and subsequently, 'the infatuation', of doing something I wasn't supposed to do.
We've all been there.
Now, with older and arguably more experienced eyes, both Lock Stock and Snatch seem hyper-stylised, with glamorised violence and plotlines driven on co-incidence; these are not bad qualities, in any way, but as I've grown up (arguably) and got older (inarguably) the violence doesn't feel as exciting, and the speed by which things are made to occur alternates between thrilling and dizzying.
I'd still watch Lock and Snatch quite happily, but now, of course, they have a context, and context is a dangerous thing. At the time, there was a kind of quasi-resurgence of London Pride (not the beer, although...), but it was a strange, almost toxic kind of pride, because suddenly all the real-life gangsters were coming out with autobiographies, going on television to talk about the past as if it were this cool, exciting adventure where people occasionally happened to get, y'know, shot; it was an interesting time. Then you had the real weirdness, like "Mad" Frankie Fraser appearing on, of all things, Brass Eye:
It's nice to imagine this as a capstone, somehow, whereby the genre - having had a nice, cheeky resurgence - couldn't actually register that it was now fodder for parody.
Now, we come to Layer Cake. Six years on from Lock and four from Snatch, Layer Cake was a fascinating film, mainly because the majority of the characters within the film - whether they were aware of it or not - were exactly the opposite of what they professed to be. And now, because of that statement, let's put the word SPOILERS in bold, underlined letters, because from hereon in we're going to have a frank, in-depth discussion about deconstruction.
Yes, I know. But I've been a film student now for two and a half years; what did you expect, exactly?
This is the fun bit; let's not even start with XXXX, the narrator / protagonist, because we'll come back to him. Let's start with Jimmy Price, because he's the most blatant character archetype.
In gangster films, there's always The Boss. The Boss tends to represent the previous generation maintaining a vice-like grip over their 'manor', including over all the criminal activity and with some inroads into the police. The Boss has pretensions of class; sometimes brought about by money, sometimes simply by longevity. However, during the course of the film The Boss will undergo a change, nearly always fatal. This isn't new; check out the final scenes of The Long Good Friday;
Bob Hoskins, having begun the film in control, is finally reaching terminal velocity at the end of the spiral of violence that his subordinate's actions has kicked off. And now, The Boss is dead, killed, in this instance, by James Bond (albeit about sixteen years before he became "[...] a sexist, mysoginist dinosaur; a relic of the Cold War"). The Boss rarely survives the gangster film, because his power is faded and his workers are jaded. Witness Hatchet Harry in Lock, Stock and Brick Top in Snatch, or even Ray Liotta in Revolver.
This is why Jimmy Price is interesting; because he makes people think he's the boss even though he functionally no longer has any power whatsoever, having lost his entire personal fortune in an ill-advised postcolonial adventure, one which Mr Temple - i.e., Dumbledore - was smart enough to only invest a relatively small amount of money in.
Jimmy doesn't need the next generation to turn up and fuck him over; he's already done, on the leash as a police informant, reduced to setting up his underlings to keep himself out of prison and for chump change informant money.
Here's the interesting thing; in Layer Cake, names have power. The most obvious is Jimmy, because he embodies The Price - or, more prosaically, the Cost Of Doing Business. He's the price that XXXX has to pay in order to stay first in business - by kicking up - and later to stay out of prison - by kicking Jimmy's bucket. From hereon in it gets (a) interesting and (b) more tenuous, so bear with me.
Next, there's Mr Temple, who's the richest man in the film; throughout the course of the film, XXXX has to go to Temple to pay homage (although the first time, he's brought there forcefully). The second time, Temple is in an (extremely pretty) room filled with books, where he discusses basically taking Jimmy's place for XXXX - at least, on one deal. The final time is in Temple's bonded warehouse, arguably his central place, where XXXX appears to have to give in to Temple's demands, only to later have his own co-conspirators take care of business in turn.
Now, let's talk about the henchmen, because Jimmy and Temple represent different things; Jimmy represents the strange kind of hereditary-by-profession advancement available to the gangster only by the death, incarceration or enforced retirement of the previous boss. Appropriately, Jimmy's henchman is called "Gene". At the same time, Temple represents business, where he is the head and those who work for him are employees, so his main henchman is called "Troop".
Business within the film, then, is king - because everyone who represents the previous iteration of gangsters basically ends up dead ("Duke", a gangster in the Jimmy mould, and his partner "Slasher", represent the rip-and-run take-no-prisoners violent era, but it's only when they threaten to cross the line between gangster and police that they end up being killed by Gene).
Then there are the more literal names; Tom Hardy's "Clarkie" is, well, a clerk in the cocaine business, performing the vital but entry-level work. "Tiptoes" is functionally a private detective, while "Morty" represents death and violence walking at XXXX's side, arguably to protect him. In the source book, if memory serves, Morty even kills someone over a can of tuna in prison, so make of that what you will.
So XXXX, in not having a name, seeks to escape the nominative determinism that tends to apply to gangsters; remember Razors Ruddock (later to play Hatchet Harry), Barry the Baptist, etc? If you don't have a name, you're better off in the gangster world, although, as XXXX states, he's not a gangster - he's a businessman. And the art of being a businessman is being a good middleman, as Temple will tell you.
Underneath all this, Layer Cake is a beautifully-shot, well-written London Crime Film, with decent charicterisation and a stubborn refusal to let anyone get away with anything. The only people I can think of that escape unpunished - i.e. don't have to lose someone they work with or are close to or a great deal of money - are Cody and Tiptoes, who will continue to entice American girls with the promise of being with the Earl of Oxford - for whom a black Aston Martin is so frightfully common - for a long time to come.
As films to start the year go, it's really one of the best.
*
No comments:
Post a Comment