Republished from our coverage of the Los Angeles film festival.
When I was a kid, there was this toy that was a kind of do-it-yourself aquarium that when you added a special powder mix to the water, it turned into a gel and made all the plastic dolphins, deep sea divers, and coral stick in suspended animation. Cool concept. But once you stuck your figures in the positions you wanted them, they just stayed there. If you tried to move them, it caused a gross-looking ripple in the gel that, no matter how many times I tried to smooth over, never quite reset.
Only God Forgives is kind of like that: beautiful tableau that gets old fast, a single-use toy for minimal aesthetic enjoyment that you put on the shelf and maybe look at every once in a while. Mostly, though, you just forget about it.
Ryan Gosling and the other actors in Nicolas Winding Refn’s film are the plastic dolphins. Refn is the God, positioning his immobile figures in the gel, fastening them to their cues, photographing them with deliberate precision in a choreographed slow-motion dance of death. But the resulting aquarium is a dull picture, indeed, one that’s shaped by an overly cautious Creator. Refn squeezes all the life out of his characters and then asks us to stare at his impassive panorama for the remainder of the film.
I should back up and give you some narrative background (although Refn is about as interested in narrative as I am in a non-shirtless Ryan Gosling): Gosling plays a boxing instructor/drug dealer expat in Thailand. His brother (Tom Burke) commits a horrible crime for which he is murdered. The brothers’ vengeful mother (a stellar Kristin Scott Thomas) flies in to Thailand to reclaim the body and seek revenge on the man who sanctioned the brother’s murder. The only problem is that that man happens to be the local police lieutenant/karaoke lover/sword-wielding vengeful maniac (Vithaya Pansringarm) who enacts his justice by slicing off the hands of whomever wrongs him.
Gosling spends his days having surreal, blood-soaked visions and his nights staring blankly at a beautiful prostitute he conscripts into pretending to be his girlfriend to meet his mother. The resulting scene is a masterpiece of understatement by Gosling and pure camp hilarity by Scott Thomas. Her chilling mother from Hell is half Donatella Versarce, half Real Housewife and all Lady Macbeth, insulting her son and his date with some of the filthiest language you’re likely to hear in a movie this year. These tonal shifts (shifts is too calm a word–they’re more like screeching needle drops) happen often in Only God Forgives, which is about 80% purgatorial nightmare and 20% laugh-out-loud comedy.
Through all of this, Gosling’s character remains a blank. Like a sleepwalker in Hell, he neither laughs nor cries, hardly blinks and his fits of sudden violence are mechanical as an automatic reflex. As Julian in Only God Forgives, he makes his character in Drive seem downright chatty by comparison. The black-clad “Angel of Death” (Panringarm) does little better. His steely gaze and erect gait telegraph a man on a mission from God (his sword seems to appear out of nowhere–another element of mysticism amid this Eastern hellscape). Only Kristin Scott Thomas’ outrageous den mother seems to exist in the real world; she’s just a tourist in Hell, whereas the other characters are permanent residents.
The highlight of the film, by far, is Cliff Martinez’s pulse-pounding, electronica-infused score. Often used to convey the otherworldly or bizarre, Martinez makes good use of the organ, recalling horror film cues of the past to create a haunted pastiche of sound. In fact, Refn leans a little too heavily on the music to ramp up what little action there is in the film, often resulting in a music video feeling to some sequences. But with music this good, it’s hard to fault him.
Even though Only God Forgives is an ultimately flavorless exercise in overwrought style, it’s tempting to just give Refn a free pass because the style here is so meticulously crafted, so delicately arranged and organized in a peculiar fashion. It’s certainly a film unlike any other. But, as with many bold experiments, Refn’s excavations result in failure. That being said, many people will love this film. Many people will hate it. I have to land somewhere in the middle. There is much to admire aesthetically, but the lack of interest in plot and character reveals a disregard for audience that mars the film’s impact.
