The Devil's Avocado

mean dude comedy

I keep forgetting about this movie.  For some reason it just drops from my mind, I can’t seem to ever remember that it was a 2008 movie - tucked away in the early, cold cold months of the year, arriving on some dreary day like…well, not like sunshine exactly but more like…like a cold cold dreary day.  These early excellent movies of the year, better than their studios believe - it’s fun to forget them sometimes, actually, because then I get the pleasure of being reminded.  In Bruges, in particular, has been a joy to remember over recent months:

Ken: Ray, you are about the worst tourist in the whole world.
Ray: Ken, I grew up in Dublin. I love Dublin. If I grew up on a farm, and was retarded, Bruges might impress me but I didn’t, so it doesn’t.

Harry: An Uzi? I’m not from South Central Los Angeles. I didn’t come here to shoot twenty black ten year olds in a drive-by. I want a normal gun for a normal person.

Harry: It’s a fairytale town, isn’t it? How’s a fairytale town not somebody’s fucking thing?

Harry: I do want the guy dead, I want him fucking crucified but it don’t change the fact that he stitched you up like a blind little gay boy, does it?

politically incorrect comedy

Ken: Harry, let’s face it. And I’m not being funny. I mean no disrespect, but you’re a cunt. You’re a cunt now, and you’ve always been a cunt. And the only thing that’s going to change is that you’re going to be an even bigger cunt. Maybe have some more cunt kids.
Harry: [furious] Leave my kids fucking out of it! What have they done? You fucking retract that bit about my cunt fucking kids!
Ken: I retract that bit about your cunt fucking kids.

Ray: My date involved two instances of extreme violence, one instance of her hand on my cock and my finger up her thing, which lasted all too briefly.

A sampling, if you will.  The language is the story.  Or maybe: the language is the character.  Or this: the language is the point.  Is there a point? There is a point, you can feel it, it’s there and it’s sort of important.  But then sort of not - and that’s the point, too.

There’s a lot of press arguing about whether there is indeed a point to Martin McDonagh’s mean, vile, toxic, shocking, offensive, violent writing.  The guy’s a bit of a superstar in the Theatre World, especially the UK Theatre world, ESPECIALLY the Irish Theatre World.  His plays are grim.  To say the least.  They often only have about four or five characters, each representing something absolute (or absolute-ish)…in a grim situation. 

I’ve seen only one of them - The Pillowman. 

Fucked.  Up. 

sick comedy (with Michael Shannon in the Steppenwolf production of Pillowman)

The story takes place in some bizarre totalitarian world with cruel detectives trying to crack their  suspect, a writer of gruesome stories usually involving the deaths of little children, to confess.  Confess what? Of killing and killing and killing lots of little children.  And, yes, there is another central character in the play who would certainly be characterized by In Bruge’s observant protagonist Ray as “retarded” (played by Michael Shannon in the Steppenwolf production I saw, coincidentally).

Is there a point to all this?

The lines I list above immediately strike me as funny.  Maybe they’re not as funny typed out in cold little black letters - I don’t know, I have the benefit of remembering the scenes they’re captured from.  But nevertheless, the lines strike me as funny - immediately.  But they’re also kind of sad, too, don’t you think?

bleak comedy

The characters in this movie (most of them) are murderers.  There is a journey you take to get to that point - becoming a murderer.  Whether you’re a professional hitman shooting other bad people or whether you are killing and killing little children, there is a journey taken.  These characters do not like the world.  Their individual journeys all convinced them somehow that the world is not worth liking, that it is sick and dying and that there is no reason, really, that they should live above that sickness. 

What’s remarkable is that they are all funny, they all know how to have fun from time to time, they are all alive and sort of want to keep it that way.  They all have done good things, so we hear, in their way.  At least one of them wants to like the world, is curious about it.  And he desperately WANTS his young companion to like the world, too, and maybe actually become a good person. 

That’s a little bit of what this movie is about, I think.  But there’s also death and gore and drugs and near-suicides and Hell and hope and a racist American Little Person (is that correct?) and a beautiful girl who is interesting and fun and exciting and is certainly worth getting to know a little better.  Oh, and this story also deals with murdered little children.  “The little boy.”

Fucked.  Up.

But it’s really funny.  To me, it is - it is very very funny.  I laughed right up to the end.  And then I remember sometimes how oddly profound it is, too.  Brendan Gleeson is one of the best actors working; Colin Farrel is highly misused in other, lesser movies; and Ralph Fiennes has always been one of my favorites.  They and the rest of the cast bring immense warmth and humour to these cold characters in this bleak story.  Along with Gran Torino, it is my favorite movie of 2008.

buddy comedy (with mcdonagh and his two stars)