Review: Only God Forgives

Well you gotta give director Nicolas Winding Refn credit.  He clearly doesn’t give a fuck what you think about him.  After dropping one of the most unexpected surprises of the last few years with the fantastic DRIVE, he comes out of far left field with his new film ONLY GOD FORGIVES.  The broad strokes of it set Ryan Gosling as a drug dealer using a Muay Thai gym as a front, onto a collision course with an uncompromising police captain.  But don’t get hung up on the plot, because Refn doesn’t.  This film has been dividing audiences since it premiered at Cannes, and for good reason.  It eschews traditional narrative devices, and is far more interested in images than meaning.  This is less a story than it is an elegiac meditation often punctuated by brutal, graphic violence.  How you feel about that is going to be the biggest factor in your reaction to the film.

I have to admit I spent the rest of the night thinking about OGF after I saw it.  I did not fully understand all of it, and tussled quite a bit with the question of was there a deeper meaning behind it all.  Of course, any film that has you breaking it down for hours afterwards has done something right.  And this is very successful in many ways.  The cinematography is stunning, with bold reds and blues playing with shadows constantly to create the hellish netherworld that these characters inhabit.

Those visuals are supported with a two-fold audio approach.  We get a soundtrack from Cliff Martinez who does not in anyway repeat his synthpop work on DRIVE.  Given the meager dialogue throughout the film, it is Martinez’s work that actually carries a great deal of the narrative weight, and does so impressively.  We also get long periods of silence.  These are all the more stunning because of the ever present music.  When that drops the lack of sound takes on an aggressive quality that fits in with the fetishized violence of the world Refn creates.  There is a lot of hard vengeance and bloody retribution being visited upon people who almost universally deserve it.

That brings us to the cast, which is to a person so perfectly cast it is difficult to imagine anyone else could have played these roles.  There are many standouts, and as good as Gosling is, he is little more than an anchor here.  The film really belongs to Kristen Scott Thomas as Crystal, a mom from hell who makes Joan Crawford look like Mrs. Weasley, and Vithaya Pansringarm as Police Chief Chang, who is without a doubt the most intimidating small man I’ve seen in a film since Begbie in TRAINSPOTTING.  These two opposing forces represent the pursuit of personal vs. universal justice in the film and both actors create a character that promises to be remembered as a classic.

So now we arrive at the big question.  Is it a great, or even good film?  I’m not sure I can answer that question fully.  It is a compelling film, and I was completely swept up in its vibe.  Much like a Mallick film this is much more interested in the setting than the content.  And the setting is gorgeous.  But it’s impossible to ignore the fact that OGF suffers from an at times lazy narrative.  It’s not too hard to figure out the core idea that is going on, but there are far too many loose threads that exist for no apparent reason.  Now it’s not the pretentious mishmash that some are claiming, but the dense imagery at play also falls short of creating the masterpiece that proponents are pushing to call it.  Too bad really, because this feels like that passionate first draft of an auteur in the fever grip of inspiration, yet it lacks the editorial eye to smooth out the rough edges of a meager narrative that could have supported one of the most impressive films in recent memory.

Instead we get a masterclass in how to enrapture an audience with your images, with a minor in why those images left without a purpose will leave your audience slightly adrift.  I’ve seen plenty of fans of the film already start to offer detailed explanations of what all is going on, and that’s a fine exercise.  But at the end of the day I didn’t see anything that convinced me many of the events at play were any less random than they seemed on the surface.

Ultimately I’d rather see a bold and unapologetic personal work like this than most summer blockbusters, because what this has in spades that they lack is a point of view.  It wants to say something, and while not altogether successful, it’s impossible to pull your eyes away.

Grade: 7/10