Topic: "Seven Psychopaths" Review by Teague (Spoilers)

Seven Psychopaths is an odd film.

I've gotten into the habit lately of not watching trailers, or at least not finishing them, once I've decided I'm interested in a movie. If I get a little ways into it and start to think "this looks fun," I stop watching, and pick up where I left off in a theater seat somewhere. This has generally been a positive trend, and it's one I'll continue. The downside is, I might have gotten the wrong read off of what I saw in the trailer when I decided Seven Psychopaths was one of those films.

In the interest of this post, I stopped after writing the above paragraph to go watch the trailer. Nope, I got the right read alright. The trailer is just not particularly indicative of what happens in the movie.

For instance, here's something you probably didn't catch in the trailer, as it's underplayed to the point of not being there: the whole movie is a Charlie Kaufman-esque "a character in the movie is writing the movie you're seeing" kind of thing. Shit, man, that should have been in the trailer, that'd be the defining selling point for me. Any degree of meta-commentary, from an unreliable narrator to an impossibly on-the-nose genre savvy farce, is my candy. Can't get enough of it.

The problem, and this is the wonky foundation upon which the rest of the movie is built, is that it doesn't play at all. The relationship between the movie we're watching, the movie the character is writing, and the stories the character is pulling from his real life to use in the movie he's writing that we're seeing, starts off baffling and never gets any easier to understand.

The actual events portrayed in the movie seem to untangle as follows - this is an attempt to explain the movie at large, not the plot as it occurs: a writer, Marty (Colin Farrell, one assumes adopting the nickname of writer/co-director Martin McDonagh) is trying to get his screenplay off the ground, for which he has a title - Seven Psychopaths - but little else. He semi-enlists the help of his best friend Billy (Sam Rockwell), insofar as Billy comes up with a couple great ideas for psychopaths to fill out the roster. One is a psychopathic paroled murderer-cum-born-again-Christian who was tormented by the father of his victim until killing himself with a knife to the throat, the other is a mob assassin who only kills fellow members of the mob, leaving behind a Jack of Diamonds playing card at the scene. Billy, it should be noted now, is partnered up with a man named Hans (Christopher Walken), and together they kidnap dogs to collect rewards for finding them. Billy steals the dog of his girlfriend's other boyfriend, a tough guy named Charlie (Woody Harrelson), ostensibly because Billy doesn't like the way Charlie treats said girlfriend. Charlie turns out to be a psychopath himself, but doesn't make the list at this point, as Marty doesn't know about him yet. At this point, Marty has two psychopaths, and thusly Billy posts an ad in the paper calling all psychopaths to tell Marty their stories. From this we get one additional psychopath, Zachariah (Tom Waits), who in a previous life was a serial killer killer. Two "killers," there - he killed serial killers and only serial killers. Cute, right? Along the way we end up with a cobbled together invention of fourth (fifth) psychopath, a Viet Kong Catholic priest hellbent on revenge, and... I think that's it in terms of psychopaths, a word I'm sick of typing.

Turns out, the murderer-cum-born-again-Christian is Hans, and the Jack of Diamonds mob killer is Billy - who took the ideas for these psychopaths from his real life and from Hans's. Once Woody Harrelson ends up in Marty's world, that brings us up to five. I don't want to be nitpicky about the number of psychopaths, but I do want to be nitpicky about the story that's being told.

Because with end-of-the-credits retrospect, we learn that the chain of events for Marty went as follows: has idea for a movie called Seven Psychopaths, a psychopath he happens to know (but didn't know was a psychopath) gets involved, and things avalanche into a whole big terrifying problem filled with psychopaths, which he later uses as the story for the movie Seven Psychopaths, which we are watching. This is complicated and difficult to understand, in terms of cause and effect, but not the most alienating framework to ever happen in a movie. And it plays, it should be noted, without ever breaking the fourth wall or using narration - though there is a lengthy scene wherein an insane Billy pitches an ending for the "movie," using a mixture of characters invented for Marty's script and characters from which they are currently running, and interpersonal conflicts invented for Marty's script and interpersonal conflicts for which they are currently scheming.

This, all of this, is rather fucking insane. And that might be the biggest problem - I wonder if this movie would have worked better as a slightly different beast. Entirely insane, not rather insane. Not a whipsmart, too-clever-by-half Kiss Kiss Bang Bang-ian character piece, but a trippy, Gilliam/Lynch reality-comes-apart movie. It could almost use the exact same script, with the exception of Marty himself. The not-quite involved, not-quite innocent Mary Sue character that reminds us all too clearly of Charlie Kaufman, the character in Adaptation, would need to be more of a Raoul Duke, Hunter S. Thompson sort of deal. And the questions of "what the fuck is going on here" would seem more like stylistic "reality unbends around a character we don't know if we can believe" sort of choice, instead of being... well, confusing, mostly.

But now I'm Monday Morning Quarterbacking.

This movie has a lot to offer. Many actors you love to watch chew up the scenery chew up the scenery - least of all, oddly, Christopher Walken, who actually ends up in a beautiful and sympathetic place by the time things wrap up - and many of the lines are laugh-out-louders. And if you stop trying to figure out what the hell is going on, you might just be better off, and I fault you none for it. Alas, I felt problems with pacing throughout the filmwatching experience, where I couldn't tell if the story was on or off the ground or if what I was watching was related to everything else I was watching, and my experience suffered for it.

I guess I'm really disappointed in this, the more I think about it. It's just sort of a mess. His previous film, In Bruges, was amazing and I enjoyed it thoroughly. I feel bad about shitting on this movie. But it turns out, all the Sam Rockwell, Christopher Walken, Tom Waits, funny lines, meta humor and clever ideas in the world can't get me over the hump on Seven Psychopaths. The movie that we end up with is an oddball - glowing with promise ultimately unfulfilled.

And god damn, I want to see the movie the trailer was made for. That one sure looks like a winner.

Teague Chrystie

I have a tendency to fix your typos.

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Re: "Seven Psychopaths" Review by Teague (Spoilers)

See, I couldn't disagree more. The movie  they sell in the trailer looks like a silly, play-it-safe studio comedy. Instead, he starts with that premise and uses it to deconstruct the genre, and critique the audience's need for a violent resolution.

It's actually very similar to Inglourious Basterds in this way, which would make sense, because that's why I love that movie, and I know you've mentioned before that's the reason you don't like that one.

Also, I fucking LOVE that they prominently feature Olga Kurylenko as an important character in the posters/trailers, she gets introduced like she'll matter, then immediately murdered 2 minutes later.

Last edited by bullet3 (2012-10-26 06:11:57)

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Re: "Seven Psychopaths" Review by Teague (Spoilers)

bullet3 wrote:

See, I couldn't disagree more. The movie  they sell in the trailer looks like a silly, play-it-safe studio comedy. Instead, he starts with that premise and uses it to deconstruct the genre, and critique the audience's need for a violent resolution.

This, absolutely. I had the same problem with In Bruges; trailer made it look like an above average buddy comedy with no real substance, and not something that would end up in my top ten favorite films. It looked good enough to get me to see the movie, but it wasn't at all a good representation of what the film ultimately was. I think the trailer for Seven Psychopaths is an even worse example. If I hadn't already loved In Bruges and really enjoyed reading Martin McDonagh's plays, this probably isn't a movie I would have seen, based on the trailers. At least not in theaters. But I gave McDonagh the benefit of the doubt, and I fucking loved this movie. Not AS much as In Bruges, but that's a special film.

Teague, in response to your review, I can totally respect your feelings on the film. It's obviously not for everyone, and some of the friends I went to see it with shared a lot of your complaints. But I had two specific things I wanted to address.

Thing one, Hans wasn't the murderer-cum-born-again-Christian, he was the father who tormented him. I'm not sure how you could get confused on that, they even revisit the moment of the throat-slitting later and put him in Harry Dean Stanton's place, with his wife at his side. Then show him getting his neck seen to at the hospital. And if I remember correctly, it's the Harry Dean Stanton tormenting father who gets labeled as the second psychopath, not the born-again Christian. He's also the one written down on the list, Marty keeps crossing out the religion.

Second thing, I never came away with the sense that the script Marty writes in the movie is the movie we're seeing. I think the meta commentary comes from the fact that McDonagh is using the screen-writing aspect to comment on the very genre the film inhabits, and uses the Psychopath script and Billy's wild proposed ending to make his criticisms. Marty never discusses a thread that ties his various Psychopaths together, and I never felt like there was an intimation that the connective tissue was ever going to be the primary story we were seeing. The Vietnamese guy was obviously intended to be an actual character in the screenplay Marty was writing. And while Billy's shoot-out was insane and over-the-top, he HAS read the rest of the actual script, which he's basing his ending around, and that would imply to me that all the Psychopaths are real and interact in some way leading to the climax, which isn't true of the film we're watching.

Obviously there's a certain amount of overlap. Most of the Psychopaths do exist in Marty's real life, and he has his interactions with them. And he comments in the car about wanting his characters to go into the desert and just talk for the second half of the movie, which is very nearly exactly what happens. But that read to me as a writer drawing certain elements from his life for inclusion in the script, as most writers will do, regardless of the story and genre they're writing. It never gets recursive enough for me to believe we're watching the story the main character is writing, in the way that Adaptation did.

I could be wrong, and I certainly can't speak to Martin McDonagh's intent, but that was my feeling watching the film.

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Re: "Seven Psychopaths" Review by Teague (Spoilers)

C-Spin wrote:

Thing one, Hans wasn't the murderer-cum-born-again-Christian, he was the father who tormented him. I'm not sure how you could get confused on that, they even revisit the moment of the throat-slitting later and put him in Harry Dean Stanton's place, with his wife at his side. Then show him getting his neck seen to at the hospital. And if I remember correctly, it's the Harry Dean Stanton tormenting father who gets labeled as the second psychopath, not the born-again Christian. He's also the one written down on the list, Marty keeps crossing out the religion.

Are you...sure? Because it's already getting hazy for me, the way that reveal-montage worked, but I distinctly recall thinking the white-man-black-woman combo out the window was not Hans and his wife, but Zachariah and his black ladyfriend. I wish the Wiki had the plot written down, or I could watch that scene again.

Second thing, I never came away with the sense that the script Marty writes in the movie is the movie we're seeing. ...  The Vietnamese guy was obviously intended to be an actual character in the screenplay Marty was writing.

Okay, check this out: the Vietnamese guy didn't exist, and Charlie did. There were two endings to the movie in the movie - the one joke ending Billy talks about, and how the movie actually ends. In the joke ending, if the argument is "this is a potential way Billy sees his life going in the immediate future," then the Vietnamese guy shouldn't be in there because he's not real. If the argument is "this is how Marty should end his movie," then Charlie shouldn't be in there whining about his dog, because that's what's really happening to them, not part of the script.

Unless is is a part of the script, which is an indication that the movie Marty is writing is the one we're watching.

Teague Chrystie

I have a tendency to fix your typos.

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Re: "Seven Psychopaths" Review by Teague (Spoilers)

Teague wrote:

Are you...sure? Because it's already getting hazy for me, the way that reveal-montage worked, but I distinctly recall thinking the white-man-black-woman combo out the window was not Hans and his wife, but Zachariah and his black ladyfriend. I wish the Wiki had the plot written down, or I could watch that scene again.

I'm pretty positive. It's Walken and his wife in the Quaker's place in that flashback. It's him for sure we see in the hospital for his neck, with his wife. Walken makes a reference to God having lost his kid too at some point, and in the psychopath story it was the Quaker's kid that got killed, by the born-again fella pre-born-again. Walken corrects Marty on his story in the car, saying that he was never alone stalking the guy, which is when it's revealed that his wife was with him. Marty ultimately has "the Quaker" whatever on his psychopath list, and Zeljko Ivanek talks about having killed "the old Quaker guy" near the end, after he's shot Walken. I do think it's kind of weird and confusing that two of the Seven Psychopaths had matronly black wives, but that's kind of a thing with McDonagh, I guess. Brendan Gleeson's dead wife was also black.

Teague wrote:

Okay, check this out: the Vietnamese guy didn't exist, and Charlie did. There were two endings to the movie in the movie - the one joke ending Billy talks about, and how the movie actually ends. In the joke ending, if the argument is "this is a potential way Billy sees his life going in the immediate future," then the Vietnamese guy shouldn't be in there because he's not real. If the argument is "this is how Marty should end his movie," then Charlie shouldn't be in there whining about his dog, because that's what's really happening to them, not part of the script.

Unless is is a part of the script, which is an indication that the movie Marty is writing is the one we're watching.

Certain details of the graveyard shoot-out are fuzzy to me. Is the dog present? Did Charlie talk about his dog? I only remember the reference to Zachariah's rabbit as far as animals. He gets away, because you can't kill the animals. If Bonnie was in that sequence, I don't remember him.

Regardless, I'll say that the fact that this confusion is present enough for us to have the debate is perhaps a sign that there is a lack of clarity about the fictional script's relation to the story. That Charlie would be in there talking about his dog doesn't necessarily represent a 1:1 relationship between the fictional script and the actual movie we're watching, but on the other hand it certainly could.

Although now that I think about it, if what we're seeing is the movie that Marty's written, the semi-post-credits sequence with Zachariah shouldn't be there.

Last edited by C-Spin (2012-10-26 22:42:23)

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Re: "Seven Psychopaths" Review by Teague (Spoilers)

[passes the bong]

(UTC-06:00) Central Time (US & Canada)

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Re: "Seven Psychopaths" Review by Teague (Spoilers)

C-Spin wrote:

Although now that I think about it, if what we're seeing is the movie that Marty's written, the semi-post-credits sequence with Zachariah shouldn't be there.

Yup. I was baffled, momentarily, when the movie DIDN'T end with the title card they agreed upon.

Then that scene happened, and I was confused again.

Teague Chrystie

I have a tendency to fix your typos.

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Re: "Seven Psychopaths" Review by Teague (Spoilers)

I just think it's not ultimately important whether the movie we see is the one he's writing. It's a story about a man grappling with his moral code vs the constraints and expectations of the genre he's writing in. I think people's familiarity with Adaptation is messing with people's expectations, because they recognize a sorta similar setup and then instantly expect the rest of the movie to neatly do the same thing in terms of Meta structure. I personally don't think every screenwriter meta-commentary story has to neatly wraparound like that, and I don't think they were really going for that in this movie. Its inherently a more playful and less realistic comedy that's messy and plays around with structure. I'd say if anything it's closer to the Big Lebowski or Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.

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