Viking Night: The Crying Game
By Bruce Hall
September 17, 2013
BoxOfficeProphets.com
For the first quarter of the film, you might forget that you're not watching a war movie. A horny tween named Jody (Forest Whitaker) is making headway flirting with a girl, whom he's just met at an amusement park. Jody is a British soldier stationed in Ireland, and currently on leave. And like a lot of guys his age in uniform, he spends his downtime on the prowl. He's caught something pretty and blond and named Jude (Miranda Richardson). But just as they're about to get it on, a gang sets upon Jody, slips a bag over his head and stuffs him into a sedan. Looks like the player got played.
Jody, who is black - did I mention that? - just got the crap beat out of him by a gang of white boys, who lured him in with a white woman. For just a moment, it feels like a John Grisham potboiler in the making, and then you hear all those Irish accents. That would be the second layer of tension involved due to the fact that a British soldier has just been kidnapped by the Irish Republican Army. For those not in the know, think of it as like the Israeli-Palestinian thing, except with Irish Catholics and English Protestants. Not only are the accents cooler, but all of these things congeal into something that rivets your eyes to the screen for a full 30 minutes.
An IRA soldier named Fergus (Stephen Rea) is assigned to watch Jody while everyone waits for the hostage swap. Jude (who has a little something on the side with Fergus) and their leader Maguire (Adrian Dunbar) are piss and vinegar firebrands who immediately point out that they'll have to kill their prisoner if the English refuse to play ball. Fergus is a bleeding heart who seems to have trouble accepting violence, and whose prominent moral code prevents him from behaving inhumanely.
Remember I've said that, because it's going to be important in a minute.
Maguire and Jude are cruel to Jody. Fergus seems to feel a little guilt over the tremendous inconvenience they've surely imposed upon this poor kid by making him think he was about to get laid, kidnapping him, beating him, and tying him to a chair for two days. I feel the same way, but I'm not a hardened terrorist willing to die for the cause. Fergus doesn't really seem to fit in with the other freedom fighters, and when it falls to him to put a bullet in Jody's head, he only reluctantly agrees. Things don't go as planned, yadda yadda - bypassing spoiler - and it turns out that Jody has a girlfriend back in England.
It also turns out that Jody asked Fergus to check in on her should..."anything happen" to him.
So - and I'm totally not saying what happens - Fergus goes to England to meet Dil (Jaye Davidson), and ends up hitting it off with her. Dil is a mysteriously alluring lounge singer who's built like a pipe cleaner and has a voice that's a few notches better than cringe worthy, but only a few. Fergus conceals his identity, and Dil is hiding something too - like how many guys she's hooked up with. But something clicks between the two of them and when old friends come calling, Fergus has some hard choices to make about trust and loyalty.
Writer-director Neil Jordan has put together a multilayered, well-meaning story that touches on a lot of interesting things. As I said there's the whole black-white issue, the IRA thing, you've got a guy who starts getting familiar with someone else's girlfriend under certain complicated circumstances that I'm not at liberty to describe. The Crying Game attempts to weave several very compelling threads into a complex tapestry and ends up with something more like one of those knotty ropes they used to make kids climb in gym class.
The problem for me is that while we know that Fergus is a "good man", we never get any sense of his values. He's a man of principle, but we don't know what those principles are. And before you try to tell me that's not important, consider this. He belongs to a terrorist organization. He participates in the kidnapping and beating of an innocent man. He then takes that man's girlfriend and gets her mixed up in very big, very bad things. But hey - at least he seems to feel really awkward about all of it. Without having any idea what motivates him, it's hard to see his actions as dramatic, instead of stupid and improbable. It's worse for Dil, whose coquettish self-doubt does little to endear her. It's difficult to buy the relationship she and Fergus begin to develop, because the story never earns it.
They don't feel like people, they feel like fickle cowards who depend on others to make decisions for them and take their own inaction to be some heightened form of integrity. The only uniform personalities in the movie are Maguire and Jude, who are each a monologue shy of caricature - but at least I can identify with them. Unfortunately, the characters we're supposed to care about the most are the most inconsistent and the least well drawn. What does Fergus really believe in, that can tie together a string of really puzzling decisions? And what the hell is it about Dil that makes all the guys want to fight and die for her? We never find out; instead we're asked to accept it all at face value.
It weakens the whole thing. It's like a slightly less than adequate mixed drink, not that good, but not quite bad enough to send back.
I almost think the film might have worked better as a dark comedy, not quite a-la A Fish Called Wanda, but more like in tone to the British version of The Office. Despite its efforts to be a dramatic thriller, there's a very droll core to The Crying Game that's just a few shades away from the visible. I enjoy that, and I enjoy the deep sense of irony and willingness to overlay multiple subjects so that you're not quite sure which one of them you're supposed to feel weird about. But as witty as it is, and as nice a bookend as the final scene makes, it pains me to say that the story never sells it. Don't let conservative do-gooders fool you; it's this - not the Big Secret - that should bother you the most.