“They were careless people,” the narrator says in “The Great Gatsby” of two of the novel’s richest, cruelest characters; “they smashed things and creatures.” They could probably get along with the equally careless wretches that populate “The Forgiven,” but especially the unhappily married couple who bump into a teenager and kill him.
David (an excellent Ralph Fiennes) and Jo (a decorative, ill-used Jessica Chastain) yell — and look — at each other as they dart down a dark Moroccan road as they plow into the boy. For reasons more narratively useful than persuasive, they take the body with them to their destination, a vast area where a bacchanal is going on. There, after servants drag the body away, David and Jo join in the festivities, taking their place among the other avatars of wealth, great privilege, and deep-rooted rot.
As Fitzgerald noted elsewhere, the very wealthy are different from you and me. They aren’t always different on screen, though, and in far too many movies they tend to fall into reliably different camps of ostentatious buffoons, heroic rescuers, or ruthless villains. “The Forgiven” is about villains. In particular, it revolves around the kind of white villains who – with their empty hours and seemingly bottomless pockets, their cultivated cynicism and prejudices born of the way – cause trouble for underprivileged souls. These monsters spin their mustaches, seduce the naive and rob the gullible because they can. They also do this because authors know that villains provide easy entertainment even when they teach object classes.
Sure, in his adaptation of Lawrence Osborne’s novel, writer-director John Michael McDonagh has done his best to distract while shooting fish in a barrel. His richest, most doubtfully easy targets are the party’s hosts, an unctuous British libertine, Richard (Matt Smith, who continues his journey as Jeremy Irons 2.0), and his down-market American lover, Dally (Caleb Landry Jones). They are pictured lying in bed – the camera opens on Dally’s naked behind – as a visibly uncomfortable Moroccan servant walks in with tea. Richard smiles at the man or perhaps his discomfort. Does the servant feel uncomfortable with male intimacy, the impudent display, or just the amused look of his boss?
McDonagh lets the moment hang, which leaves him looking off the hook. It doesn’t though, not really, and he says: something by making two gay lovers the most striking embodiments of neo-colonial excesses in the story. Here’s how it goes: That night, Richard calls the servants boys, and Dally ends the party (and your sensibilities) by thanking their “little Moroccan friends” who renovated the compound. The guests in tuxedos and frocks laugh and whirl, eat and drink while Moroccans float and serve. A screaming blonde jumps into a pool the size of a lake. Later, Jo casually mentions that she and David killed a Moroccan on their way to the festivities; on another point, David sneers at “pederasts” and name checks Allen Ginsberg.
“The Forgiven” doesn’t get any more nuanced, though things improve when David agrees to drive off with the dead boy’s father, Abdellah (Ismael Kanater), and a companion, Anouar (Saïd Taghmaoui). It makes no sense given David’s preconceptions and suspicions. He just goes because the story needs him, but it does take you away from the claustrophobia of the compound. Most of the time, though, you can spend time with Fiennes, whose performance—in his intricate, complex play of emotions and in the push-pull of David’s disdain for himself and for everything else—says more about the nihilism of this world than all the brittle chatter. . Fiennes layers David, unravels this man until you see his hollow inside.
McDonagh’s work is more nuanced and his touch lighter in the scenes with David and these other men, even though the story gets heavier and then leaden. There is less whining and hyperbolization, and McDonagh uses the visual drama of the landscape and the chasm that separates these characters in a beautiful contrapuntal way. Here, in the tantalizing, foreboding spaces between David and Abdellah, you can see in their looks and hesitating words how power flows from man to man, from world to world, nourishing but also engulfing.
Then you’re reminded of the edgier work McDonagh has done before, like “Calvary” and “The Guard,” and how good he can be when characters talk because they have something to say.
the forgiven
Rated R for gun and vehicle violence. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. In theatres.
