One goodbye for everyone

Each Day, A Film
February 14th 2012 (Retrospective) 


Yes, fact fans, I'm persisting with this one. Even a promise lately kept is a promise worth keeping. 


However, let's finally - finally - get around to talking about The Guard. 

In a weird kind of a way, I actually went out of my way to see The Guard when it first came out on DVD. See, at the time, I had this fun illness - no details, naturally, because this is the internet - and as part of that I had to actually physically drag my damn carcass to the local GP for an assessment, then, because I'm pants-on-head stupid (and more likely because I hadn't been able to leave the house for five days by this point) I decided to go and do some shopping. 


This was, at the time, a mistake. 


But I did pick up a copy of The Guard, so all's well that ends up more or less well, I suppose.


Now, there's an easy argument to make about Brendan Gleeson, in that post In Bruges, his career has become a little... Odd. Typecast, but odd. It's possible to see Gerry - the titular Guard - as a kind of alternate universe Ken, in that if he'd become a policeman instead of a contract killer, maybe he'd have ended up in a tiny police station with not much going on. 


Then I did the littlest bit of research, and, well, Brendan Gleeson's career is kind of epic, really. Put it this way; anyone who goes from 28 Days Later to The Smurfs 2 (rumoured) in the space of just over a decade has to be, in some ways, admired. 


But to lump The Guard in with In Bruges feels a little lazy, somehow. 


I confess to only having been to Ireland twice - and both times, to the same place - but I like to think that, however briefly I was there, I got a little bit of a feel for the place, especially the concept of a different feeling of time passing (and the air being that much cleaner). 


So when I was watching this over the weekend with a couple of friends, and one of them asked me whether this was what Ireland was really like, I demurred through lack of experience, but, thinking about it now; isn't the Ireland of The Guard basically the same kind of decayed world we're taught that we're living in now, just with the weirdest kind of antihero there to take on all-comers after he's got rid of the milkshake headache? 


Put it this way; the police are corrupt in their entirety (or, at least, "as many of them as matters"); the marshes are hiding places for gun stashes; the hero is willing to sell said gun stashes on to the IRA; the drug smugglers are portrayed as the most overtly erudite people around (with arguments about philosophy and deconstruction of popular crime tropes abounding) and the American law enforcement representative is a quiet, cultured, inward-looking person who's not, as people keep asking, from the Behavioural Sciences Unit. 


It's as if in one film someone - another McDonagh, brother to the In Bruges McDonagh - decided to simultaneously lampshade every possible trope about Irish culture while equally inverting every other trope about crime films and westerns. 


And with that, there's really not that much else to say about The Guard, other than to mention that even after three years of studying film, I can still watch this one without the Analysis Dial in my head turning too far towards "stop enjoying this and start criticising it". 


Yes, it's quite a big dial to have that written on it. Thank you for asking.