Sexy Beast

21/09/2024

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Corrosive Control

                     There is always the risk in casting against type that the filmmaker will end up with nothing more than miscasting, an especially great risk in a film where its director, Jonathan Glazer, says, “I've come to the conclusion that casting is everything: if you cast wrong you compromise the lot.” (Sight and Sound) Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast might seem like an extreme example if most regard Kingsley’s most synonymous role as Gandhi. Gandhi believed in pacifism and reckoned one’s aims could be achieved without violence. When unable to implement his beliefs he would gently try and persuade his interlocutor. In Sexy Beast, Don Logan (Kingsley) won’t take no for an answer even when he insists it is a simple question: a yes or a no. Logan is speaking to fellow but now retired gangster Gal (Ray Winstone) in the latter’s Costa del Sol retreat. Logan wants him to come in on a heist in London and Gal insists he is no longer match fit, no longer wants to be involved. But Don really won’t take no for an answer. While this usually means that someone is persuasive, perhaps cajoling, occasionally pestering, with Don it is pathological. As Peter Bradshaw noted, Logan is “…a man who talks to other people the same way he talks to himself in the bathroom mirror: in a clipped, cramped, twitchy monologue of fear.” (Guardian)

    When interviewed by Charlie Rose, Kingsley says he found the energy for the character in the personality of Logan but also noted that he represents the worst aspects of all our personalities, including his own. However, what is more useful aesthetically, rather than psychologically, is to see Don Logan as the worst aspect of Kingsley’s characters; that it wasn’t so much an example of casting against type but extending types Kingsley has already played before, contrary to Glazer’s initial assumption. “I knew Ben Kingsley wanted to do the part but I'd resisted seeing him because I didn't think he had that in him. He'd always played sanctimonious, careful, liberal characters — but when he walked in I knew straight away that he was right."  (Sight and Sound) To view Gandhi as the quintessential Kingsley performance and Logan its antithesis might be to ignore roles he has played that function somewhere in between, roles that may have more in common with Don Logan than with Mahatma Gandhi. Restricting ourselves to a couple of films before Sexy Beast, we can think of Betrayal and Pascal’s Island, with Kingsley playing a cuckolded husband in the former and an informer in the latter. What they share is Kingsley’s capacity to stare with subtext. This might seem odd given how verbally explicit Kingsley’s performance appears to be in Sexy Beast as he’s constantly uncouth, but this is partly what makes Logan so unnerving. As for the capacity to stare, David Bordwell notes that “research in interpersonal communication suggests that in Western societies, talk between two parties displays patterns of looking and looking away. These patterns are regulated by turn-taking, as the conversants switch the roles of speaker and listener. Most commonly, the speaker looks away from the listener more frequently than the listener looks away from the speaker. Perhaps surprisingly, the two parties seldom share a look for very long. It appears that stretches of mutual gaze, with eyes locked, are infrequent and brief.” (‘Poetics of Cinema’) Bordwell speaks of actors including Michel Caine, Samuel L. Jackson and Anthony Hopkins. If it is the case that actors often blink far less often than the rest of us (about 14-17 times a minute), it is surely also the case that many actors inclined to play wilful or dangerous will blink less frequently than in a hesitant or empathic role. Yet Kingsley blinks quite often in Sexy Beast, so while we don’t doubt that he is unblinking in his demeanour as he commands completely the environment he occupies when he is at Gal’s, this doesn’t manifest itself in literally not blinking. 

    What matters is more the subtext: a capacity to contain within the performance the sense that sitting within it is resentment, desire, affection or whatever it might be that is greater than the expression. When we see Logan going into the bathroom and attacking himself as he has been attacking Gal, Gal’s wife, Deedee, their friends, Aitch and Aitch’s wife ( with whom Logan has had an affair), the scene is impressive but superfluous — Kinsgley has already convinced us that he is a man at war with himself as well as with others. He stands in front of the mirror saying he should never have said anything to Gal about Jackie: “still giving too much of yourself away mate; let’s keep shtum.” He looks like a man never too far away from hitting himself as readily as someone else, as if hoping to discover in others the hatred he finds inside and that can be given outer form in their fear and disgust towards him. Whether he is telling everyone he needs to take a piss, announcing that he fucked Jackie and she stuck her finger up his arse, or that he has to change his shirt because he is sweating like a cunt, he knows he won’t win any friends by his vulgar use of language. But he at least knows well how to make enemies. 

     It might even be a useful definition of the aggressively insecure: while making friends is an intricate business reliant on charm, charisma, generosity and numerous other potential qualities, to make an enemy can be much more cause and effect. An insult or two is usually sufficient. Kingsley brings to the role a self-hatred not so very different from its manifestation in an adaptation of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, where the advantage he has over his best friend, played by Jeremy Irons, is knowing that his wife has been cheating on him for years; with Irons unaware that Kingsley knew, and thinking that he was keeping his friend in the dark when it was Kingsley who was keeping Irons in a state of ignorance. Kingsley plays it as though aware that all human interaction is a transaction but without the direct aggression evident in Logan. In Pascali’s Island, the title could again be betrayal, with Kingsley the titular character living on a Turkish island who offers secrets to the authorities, and this includes details on two people: a man whom he envies and his new lover, whom Kingsley is infatuated by and has known for years. 

   We offer a few details about these other earlier Kingsley films to say that casting against type often means little more than bringing out qualities in a new performance that was latent in another. Anybody from Bob Hoskins to Michael Caine, Richard Burton to Terence Stamp has played very convincingly gangsters, but the danger in casting someone who has already played villainous is that the performance becomes self-conscious: that the actor is playing on earlier characteristics and the viewer plays equally on that knowledge. A fine actor is at risk of becoming a movie villain rather than villainous, with the noun stronger than the adjective. By drawing upon qualities of subtext, by casting an actor capable of generating tension in a stare that is so convincing we might remember it as unblinking, the film offers a more original take than if Sexy Beast had cast to type. 

       Yet this is precisely what the film does with Ray Winstone, but that needn’t indicate a weaker performance. Winstone first became a star playing the hard man Carlin in a borstal in Scum, with his famous line, “I’m the daddy now.” When he appears in Tank Malling, Face and Nil by Mouth, he could easily be Carlin a few years down the line, and Gal might be a not-very-distant cousin to all of them. So why isn’t Winstone typecast? Perhaps because often what you want from the protagonist is familiarity and what you wish for from villainy is surprise. If one casts an actor too well-known for playing baddies this is all very well if the filmmaker seeks the generic, where the question isn’t one of shock but expectation. The viewer knows the character will kick off due to the actor playing the role — it would be disappointing if they didn’t. But if you want a deeper tension than the expectant, it is often useful to cast against type, with Henry Fonda immediately yet surprisingly villainous in Once Upon a Time in the West, and Jeff Bridges revealed as the murderer as the viewer is torn for much of the film between seeing him as a nice guy potential murder in Jagged Edge. These are still generic works but gain an added dimension from what might at first have been seen as miscasting. Sometimes, part of the seriousness of certain works rests on the tension between the villainous and the heroic, between qualities the viewer identifies with and aspects the audience is repelled by. The actor may not be working so obviously against type as Fonda and Bridges, but they generate unresolved responses in the viewers’ general perception of them throughout the film. Works like The French Connection, Taxi Driver and The Godfather rest on this tension: central protagonists who contain a racist, misogynistic or treacherous quality, making their actions potentially much more disturbing than when conducted by someone coded as villainous.  

    Winstone’s characters are often heroically villainous or villainously heroic — they aren’t quite one of the other. Even in Nil by Mouth, where he plays a small-time criminal and domestic abuser, Winstone plays him as a figure of terrible ambivalence: when he violently beats his wife he does it with almost simultaneous despair, aware that he is an abusive thug within the desire to be a caring husband. In Sexy Beast, this is minimised as Gal is almost entirely loving and his wife more capable of violence than he is: she takes out  Logan with a shotgun after he beats up Gal. Sexy Beast is generic enough to show a clear division between the protagonist and antagonist, but not so genre-driven that it casts the villain expectantly. 

          Other examples of casting are surely nods towards a great and very brief period of British gangster cinema at the beginning of the seventies (Performance; Villain, Get Carter), with James Fox. the gangster in Performance, taking a minor role as banker Harry, and Ian McShane (playing Teddy), a gang member in Villain, playing a secondary role as the head of the heist Gal is involved in. It is unlikely Jonathan Glazer expects the viewer to make much of these associations and this might be another example of the film’s retreat from ‘pure’ genre. When a film like The Expendables employs Schwarzenegger, Stallone and Van Damme, few watching will be unaware that they have been cast because of their links with action films of the eighties and nineties. Their familiarity as names and faces is part of the predictably generic. Sexy Beast feels both to acknowledge that demand and to resist it, as though it wanted to make a British gangster film at a time when it had become a saturated trend (Gangster No 1, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Rancid Aluminium etc.). 

        Glazer was coming from commercials and MTV videos; well-respected in those fields but these are areas usually offering images that function off a high level of inevitable predictability: the work has to tell a story in a few seconds or minutes. In Sexy Beast, Glazer uses this skill positively at the beginning of the film as a huge boulder rolls down a hill and just misses Gal, before landing in his swimming pool and smashing the pool’s tiles. Showing us the rock’s point of view as it works its way down towards Gal, Glazer then shows us the rock from behind moving towards him, and also the rock landing in the water before cutting to the oblivious Gal now soaked from the splash. It could have been a brilliant advert for health and safety (don’t build your home close to loose rock formations) or an amusing one for beer (it could have been a barrel rolling down the mountain and resembling the barrel chest belonging to Gal). But here it is no more than a precursor to narrative events and part of an image structure that will include later another swimming pool — the one Gal and others use in London as they break into the bank next door to the baths. They access it by swimming under the pool with diving gear and drilling from a tunnel into the bank’s security vault. Yet initially we see it as a harbinger and, sure enough, shortly after the boulder incident, Logan visits, as if the lucky escape Gal had with the rock will be followed by the misfortunate of ever having got involved with Don.  

          Central to the film’s achievement is its ability to be self-conscious without quite falling into the self-reflexive, with Sexy Beast finally more preoccupied with its form than insistent over its genre awareness. In its playing with the time frame it may resemble Steven Soderbergh’s gangster film with Terence Stamp, The Limey (which was itself indebted to John Boorman’s Point Blank), but it is as if the form has been absorbed rather than the tropes played up. The difference lies in formal detail over narrative expectation. The gangster film has many tropes a viewer comes to expect: a friend one betrays, an initiating ritual into a violent world, material extravagance, a developing drug habit, paranoia and ruining one’s domestic life. The more a film knowingly acknowledges or inevitably uses such tropes, the more aware the viewer will be of the gangster film they are watching —and many a good one uses almost all of the above, including Scarface and Good Fellas. But most gangster films also find a form to match the expectation as they play up pace, while Glazer plays on slowness, creating instead of an accelerated momentum, a geometric fixity closer to a stage play: “I had to be architectural about it, and keep the second act absolutely angular.”(Indiewire) It gives to the film the tension of theatre and this might have been again why Kingsley is such good casting. When Glazer says “You know the rhythms in a Pinterish way — and the brutality of the dialogue informs everything”, we should remember of course that Betrayal was written by Pinter, taken from his own play. By emphasising the stillness of Kingsley and offering a form that reflects this, the director and his writers, Louis Mellis and David Scinto, want to find in the gangster film its psychology. “I was trying to get Ben to be as still as possible through the entire film.” (IndieWire) Though Pinter wrote more than twenty scripts he never wrote a gangster film (even though he appeared as one in Jez Butterworth’s Mojo); nevertheless, much of his work can seem a closer cousin to the genre than we might initially believe, with the Pinteresque possessing often a complex zero-sum game. Even in Betrayal, about a man cheating with his best friend's wife, told over several years and in reverse order, Pinter manages to convey less the friendship than the rivalry, with the film’s final (and chronologically initial) irony resting on how little the adulterer knows next to the cuckold. Irons as the one who betrays his friend ends up feeling more put out than the one cheated upon. There is almost no violence in the film except a slap Kingsley administers to his wife, in the film's opening sequence and viewed through a window — we can’t hear what is said. But throughout, the film offers a sense of menace greater than any deed to match it.

      Sexy Beast has an aspect of this threatening violence even if the film contains scenes where it is fully manifest: in Kingsley’s murder and later when Teddy kills Harry. Glazer manages to convey that violence isn’t a punctuated release from tension but if anything its exacerbation. With Kingsley dead, this doesn’t mean the problem has gone away — it is quite possible it has only just started, since Don hasn’t casually popped over to Spain to visit an old friend; he is there on the behest of others who want Gal back in London. Equally, when Gal witnesses Harry killed by Terry, he becomes aware of how violent Teddy can be and knows that Teddy suspects he is hiding Don’s death. He is alive only because Teddy never much cared for Logan, but the viewer might believe that Teddy would kill Gal for lying to him. Throughout, Glazer wants to create fixed frames and minimal camera movements to indicate that what matters is what is going on in people’s heads more than what they are doing with their bodies. Though the film offers plenty rapid shots, they are often reserved for the London scenes, while in Spain the image matches much more the geometry of the house Gal has bought.  

     Sure, in Spain, there are moments like a point of view shot from Aitch’s and Jackie’s perspective as they come to the restaurant dinner table that indicates something untoward; and the camera following Gal as he hears Logan returning to his villa after failing to return to London, while the camera retreats in front of Logan, followed by a zoom shot as Don goes up the villa’s steps. But the film’s purpose is the opposite of the frenetic. Partly what gives the film its stillness is Gal’s reluctance to get involved. It isn’t uncommon for a heist film to show someone at the end of their career, pulling off one last robbery or willing to come out of retirement for one final job: it is almost a genre unto itself: Heat, Thief, Drive, Layer Cake, Baby Driver. But Sexy Beast never quite gives us the thrill of the chase, with even the inventive heist given relatively little screen time. While in Rififi, The Red Circle and Heat, the films moves towards the robbery, Sexy Beast all but retreats from it, embedding the action within the main body of the film which concerns Logan’s arrival, his murder and the cover-up. Glazer conveys more fear over Teddy taking out Gal if he finds out exactly what happened to Logan than excitement over stealing vast sums of money by using underwater drilling equipment to break into the bank. Some might see a misplaced sense of priorities, others will see that this is where the film’s originality lies — perhaps paradoxically given that the robbery itself is hardly a standard heist.

              However, if we are right to assume that the film is psychologically inflected rather than action-oriented then what counts isn’t to master the logistics of the action but the geometry of human interaction as Glazer insistently frames to suggest what is going on in someone’s head. It is there when Logan arrives and asks Gal about the villa, saying it seems a bit isolated. Gal says not at all without quite disagreeing with Don; more proposing a broader perspective on things than Logan can initially see. We first witness Don frontally in medium long shot, then in medium close up and then more tightly, before Glazer reverses the angle as we see him ramrod straight from behind. All the while, the film cuts back and forth between Logan and the others, making talk so small that it becomes as tight as Logan’s white, short-sleeve shirt. If we have seen Gal at the beginning, letting it all hang out as he lounged at the pool in yellow trunks a couple of sizes too small for his now widening girth, Don likes everything hemmed in, and his presence has turned the loose-tongued team of Gal, his wife and their best friends tight-lipped. If Pinter’s dialogue had a filmic form (perhaps best captured in his work with Joseph Losey), this would be close to it (and we might have wished that Glazer had adapted Betrayal over David Jones). Gangster dialogue is usually propulsive, moving the story forward because everybody within the film has the same purpose, but Sexy Beast might have the laziest opening of any gangster work, as though it didn’t want to emphasise the gangster genre at all. As Glazer says, “in a way, it was trying to be a film that wasn’t about a gangster.” (Indiewire)

       However, if we are correct to see the film as an exploration of the psychology of the gangster film, then it is good on the gangster mindset, as if trying to extricate thought from action better to show thought at work. This is again, the Pintereseque aspect: to illustrate underlying violence more than its actualisation, in contrast to Scorsese or De Palma’s approach in Good Fellas or Scarface, for example, where the level of violence becomes almost comedic. This isn’t because the films fail; it is instead that the characters achieve startling degrees of brutal success, and the films then show the violent excess as they become more and more established. One of the problems with some of the British gangster films of the late 90s/early 2000s is that they took that violence as the raison d’être of the genre, played up the aggression and expected absurdist self-consciousness to pass for good faith. They were doing violence as comedy and expected the viewer to have a good time no matter the terrors the characters were undergoing, with no film more representative, nor more commercially successful, than the vacuous Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Guy Ritchie’s film makes violence light while Glazer's makes dialogue heavy, trying to find in frame, physical form and the spoken word the components that can suggest the underlying principle out of which violence comes. If most gangster film violence is situational, if it is produced out of the ambitions and drives of the characters, then the root of the aggression isn’t so important unless we have to remind ourselves that these are exceptionally violent people, willing to get what they want by harming those who are in their way. If Scorsese, De Palma and others normalised violence, then along came Ritchie and Tarantino to glamourise it, making it comedically cool. We needn’t attack especially Scorsese for this trajectory even if no film more than GoodFellas acknowledged the absurd circumstances gangsters would find themselves in going about their work. Murdering and burying people can be a hungry business, and who wouldn’t want a plate of meatballs and spaghetti afterwards? You take a liking to a girl and the neighbour tries to get handsy with her; of course, you beat him to within a couple of inches of his existence? Scorsese brilliantly shows us people who try having regular lives within their irregular actions — they take so much further the tensions and conflicts that are part of daily life and the viewer is left flabbergasted by the normalisation. But glamorisation is something else; it asks us to expect the worst and gleefully accept it. There is an enormous difference between the two even if one may seem inevitably have led to the other.

     Sexy Beast in this sense backtracks: it wishes to find in the mind of gangsters the wariness that comes with stillness, and so Gal is in easy retirement when he receives an uneasy visit from Logan. In glamourised gangster violence, it isn’t threatening; it is gleefully anticipated — the film would disappoint with its non-violence if it didn’t actualise the tension. Sexy Beast may at moments activate the brutality but it doesn’t seem a condition of the filmic experience; it is already there in the ferocity of language. When Logan insults Gal or his wife, each verbal claim is like a physical blow, with Gal or Deedee, Aitch or Jackie flinching in response. Sometimes it doesn’t even need to be an insult; Logan generates tension merely by his presence and whatever he happens to be saying. During the evening after his arrival that afternoon, the five of them are sitting around in conversation and Logan tells Jackie she has a nice voice, a nice telephone voice; sounds like she worked in an office, as he asks if she ever worked in an office and repeats she has a nice telephone voice — before saying he worked in an office, when he was seventeen. The repetition of the words office and telephone, and the pauses in the conversation that show Logan in complete control of the environment, are briefly broken by Deedee when Logan says he worked in an office when he was seventeen and asks if people were surprised. Deedee wonders if he is asking that they are surprised he was once seventeen and the camera cuts back to Logan, and he slowly moves his head from looking in the direction of Jackie to Deedee. If looks could kill, then Logan has mastered the assassin’s gaze as it would be impossible not to feel uncomfortable by the slow and steady rotation of the look, like the turret of a tank aiming its sights. When Glazer insisted “we had Ray for Gary and we were looking for his opposite number. Physicality is very importantto me - I knew I couldn't go bigger than Ray Winstone to get the sense of physical conflict I needed so I'd have to go smaller.” (Sight and Sound) 

      But even more Glazer needed to go sharper, with Kingsley the classically trained Shakespearian actor against the instinctively forceful Winstone. When Gal speaks here he almost yawns out the words, his chubby body met by a flabby use of language that the springy, alert Logan won’t tolerate. When Don tries to persuade Gal to take on the job, Gal says don’t do this and Logan says do what. “This”, Gal says, and what this is, is language; he uses words to destroy other people's bodies as we watch Gal, Deedee, Aitch and Jackie’s nerves twitching in his company. One scene shows Aitch apparently disagreeing with Logan when he refuses to take money for a meal. Whether it is a compliment he offers, a meal that he insists on paying for, or trying to persuade Gal to take part in a robbery, there is no rhetorical difference between them. He uses language constantly as a battering ram, breaking other people’s nervous systems all the better to assert his will. Logan is no doubt a violent man, but he manages to convey in his assertiveness that violence isn’t a last resort — it is just another tool at his disposal, and likely to be used as much out of frustration with himself as in trying to convince another of his prowess. He achieves the latter just by walking into a room. When he bottles Gal it seems no worse than calling him a flabby cunt or reminding Gal that Deedee is an ex-porn star. It is names rather than sticks and stones that can really hurt because when offered by someone like Logan, they sting deep. They are properly corrosive: third-degree burns as insult. At last, when Don gets physical it galvanises everyone into action. First, the pool boy turns up and threatens Logan before the rifle is taken out of the boy’s hand, before Deedee turns her rifle on Don and prepares to blow a hole into him, before the film jumps forward as we see Gal in London, apparently ready to help out in the heist. It is only later in the film view Logan lying in his own blood before Aitch offers the coup de grace with a heavy object. 

     In another film, perhaps like Pulp Fiction or Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, the cut from Deedee about to shoot and Gal in London might seem like a tease, a clever narrative trick to leave us wondering what happened. But instead, it seems like an ellipsis there to make us accept that Deedee will have killed Logan and to leave us wondering why exactly he has decided to take the London job. After all, it looked as if he might have been compelled to take it because of Don’s forcefulness, but with Don surely out of the way, couldn’t he have avoided getting involved? The film puts us back into the psychological rather than the teasingly anticipatory. It is as if the film wants constantly to find the points of psychological tension and intrigue and places the dramatic within that context. It might be fair to say that Sexy Beast’s screenwriters are no Pinters, but that would be premised on the expectations of the Pinteresuqe rather than those of the gangster movie. However, if we see Sexy Beast as a gangster film that more than most has absorbed the menace to be found in some of Pinter’s work, that doesn’t mean it needs to eschew the physically violent completely. It only needs to accept it comes from character as much as from situation, and in casting Kingsley in such a key role we discover it is less about casting against type but casting dead centre in the context of Sexy Beast’s interest in diction as power. As Mark Olsen says, “Sexy Beast sizzles with the rhythms of language unleashed, with the specific forms of violence that only words can convey.” (Film Comment) 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Sexy Beast

Corrosive Control

                     There is always the risk in casting against type that the filmmaker will end up with nothing more than miscasting, an especially great risk in a film where its director, Jonathan Glazer, says, “I've come to the conclusion that casting is everything: if you cast wrong you compromise the lot.” (Sight and Sound) Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast might seem like an extreme example if most regard Kingsley’s most synonymous role as Gandhi. Gandhi believed in pacifism and reckoned one’s aims could be achieved without violence. When unable to implement his beliefs he would gently try and persuade his interlocutor. In Sexy Beast, Don Logan (Kingsley) won’t take no for an answer even when he insists it is a simple question: a yes or a no. Logan is speaking to fellow but now retired gangster Gal (Ray Winstone) in the latter’s Costa del Sol retreat. Logan wants him to come in on a heist in London and Gal insists he is no longer match fit, no longer wants to be involved. But Don really won’t take no for an answer. While this usually means that someone is persuasive, perhaps cajoling, occasionally pestering, with Don it is pathological. As Peter Bradshaw noted, Logan is “…a man who talks to other people the same way he talks to himself in the bathroom mirror: in a clipped, cramped, twitchy monologue of fear.” (Guardian)

    When interviewed by Charlie Rose, Kingsley says he found the energy for the character in the personality of Logan but also noted that he represents the worst aspects of all our personalities, including his own. However, what is more useful aesthetically, rather than psychologically, is to see Don Logan as the worst aspect of Kingsley’s characters; that it wasn’t so much an example of casting against type but extending types Kingsley has already played before, contrary to Glazer’s initial assumption. “I knew Ben Kingsley wanted to do the part but I'd resisted seeing him because I didn't think he had that in him. He'd always played sanctimonious, careful, liberal characters — but when he walked in I knew straight away that he was right."  (Sight and Sound) To view Gandhi as the quintessential Kingsley performance and Logan its antithesis might be to ignore roles he has played that function somewhere in between, roles that may have more in common with Don Logan than with Mahatma Gandhi. Restricting ourselves to a couple of films before Sexy Beast, we can think of Betrayal and Pascal’s Island, with Kingsley playing a cuckolded husband in the former and an informer in the latter. What they share is Kingsley’s capacity to stare with subtext. This might seem odd given how verbally explicit Kingsley’s performance appears to be in Sexy Beast as he’s constantly uncouth, but this is partly what makes Logan so unnerving. As for the capacity to stare, David Bordwell notes that “research in interpersonal communication suggests that in Western societies, talk between two parties displays patterns of looking and looking away. These patterns are regulated by turn-taking, as the conversants switch the roles of speaker and listener. Most commonly, the speaker looks away from the listener more frequently than the listener looks away from the speaker. Perhaps surprisingly, the two parties seldom share a look for very long. It appears that stretches of mutual gaze, with eyes locked, are infrequent and brief.” (‘Poetics of Cinema’) Bordwell speaks of actors including Michel Caine, Samuel L. Jackson and Anthony Hopkins. If it is the case that actors often blink far less often than the rest of us (about 14-17 times a minute), it is surely also the case that many actors inclined to play wilful or dangerous will blink less frequently than in a hesitant or empathic role. Yet Kingsley blinks quite often in Sexy Beast, so while we don’t doubt that he is unblinking in his demeanour as he commands completely the environment he occupies when he is at Gal’s, this doesn’t manifest itself in literally not blinking. 

    What matters is more the subtext: a capacity to contain within the performance the sense that sitting within it is resentment, desire, affection or whatever it might be that is greater than the expression. When we see Logan going into the bathroom and attacking himself as he has been attacking Gal, Gal’s wife, Deedee, their friends, Aitch and Aitch’s wife ( with whom Logan has had an affair), the scene is impressive but superfluous — Kinsgley has already convinced us that he is a man at war with himself as well as with others. He stands in front of the mirror saying he should never have said anything to Gal about Jackie: “still giving too much of yourself away mate; let’s keep shtum.” He looks like a man never too far away from hitting himself as readily as someone else, as if hoping to discover in others the hatred he finds inside and that can be given outer form in their fear and disgust towards him. Whether he is telling everyone he needs to take a piss, announcing that he fucked Jackie and she stuck her finger up his arse, or that he has to change his shirt because he is sweating like a cunt, he knows he won’t win any friends by his vulgar use of language. But he at least knows well how to make enemies. 

     It might even be a useful definition of the aggressively insecure: while making friends is an intricate business reliant on charm, charisma, generosity and numerous other potential qualities, to make an enemy can be much more cause and effect. An insult or two is usually sufficient. Kingsley brings to the role a self-hatred not so very different from its manifestation in an adaptation of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, where the advantage he has over his best friend, played by Jeremy Irons, is knowing that his wife has been cheating on him for years; with Irons unaware that Kingsley knew, and thinking that he was keeping his friend in the dark when it was Kingsley who was keeping Irons in a state of ignorance. Kingsley plays it as though aware that all human interaction is a transaction but without the direct aggression evident in Logan. In Pascali’s Island, the title could again be betrayal, with Kingsley the titular character living on a Turkish island who offers secrets to the authorities, and this includes details on two people: a man whom he envies and his new lover, whom Kingsley is infatuated by and has known for years. 

   We offer a few details about these other earlier Kingsley films to say that casting against type often means little more than bringing out qualities in a new performance that was latent in another. Anybody from Bob Hoskins to Michael Caine, Richard Burton to Terence Stamp has played very convincingly gangsters, but the danger in casting someone who has already played villainous is that the performance becomes self-conscious: that the actor is playing on earlier characteristics and the viewer plays equally on that knowledge. A fine actor is at risk of becoming a movie villain rather than villainous, with the noun stronger than the adjective. By drawing upon qualities of subtext, by casting an actor capable of generating tension in a stare that is so convincing we might remember it as unblinking, the film offers a more original take than if Sexy Beast had cast to type. 

       Yet this is precisely what the film does with Ray Winstone, but that needn’t indicate a weaker performance. Winstone first became a star playing the hard man Carlin in a borstal in Scum, with his famous line, “I’m the daddy now.” When he appears in Tank Malling, Face and Nil by Mouth, he could easily be Carlin a few years down the line, and Gal might be a not-very-distant cousin to all of them. So why isn’t Winstone typecast? Perhaps because often what you want from the protagonist is familiarity and what you wish for from villainy is surprise. If one casts an actor too well-known for playing baddies this is all very well if the filmmaker seeks the generic, where the question isn’t one of shock but expectation. The viewer knows the character will kick off due to the actor playing the role — it would be disappointing if they didn’t. But if you want a deeper tension than the expectant, it is often useful to cast against type, with Henry Fonda immediately yet surprisingly villainous in Once Upon a Time in the West, and Jeff Bridges revealed as the murderer as the viewer is torn for much of the film between seeing him as a nice guy potential murder in Jagged Edge. These are still generic works but gain an added dimension from what might at first have been seen as miscasting. Sometimes, part of the seriousness of certain works rests on the tension between the villainous and the heroic, between qualities the viewer identifies with and aspects the audience is repelled by. The actor may not be working so obviously against type as Fonda and Bridges, but they generate unresolved responses in the viewers’ general perception of them throughout the film. Works like The French Connection, Taxi Driver and The Godfather rest on this tension: central protagonists who contain a racist, misogynistic or treacherous quality, making their actions potentially much more disturbing than when conducted by someone coded as villainous.  

    Winstone’s characters are often heroically villainous or villainously heroic — they aren’t quite one of the other. Even in Nil by Mouth, where he plays a small-time criminal and domestic abuser, Winstone plays him as a figure of terrible ambivalence: when he violently beats his wife he does it with almost simultaneous despair, aware that he is an abusive thug within the desire to be a caring husband. In Sexy Beast, this is minimised as Gal is almost entirely loving and his wife more capable of violence than he is: she takes out  Logan with a shotgun after he beats up Gal. Sexy Beast is generic enough to show a clear division between the protagonist and antagonist, but not so genre-driven that it casts the villain expectantly. 

          Other examples of casting are surely nods towards a great and very brief period of British gangster cinema at the beginning of the seventies (Performance; Villain, Get Carter), with James Fox. the gangster in Performance, taking a minor role as banker Harry, and Ian McShane (playing Teddy), a gang member in Villain, playing a secondary role as the head of the heist Gal is involved in. It is unlikely Jonathan Glazer expects the viewer to make much of these associations and this might be another example of the film’s retreat from ‘pure’ genre. When a film like The Expendables employs Schwarzenegger, Stallone and Van Damme, few watching will be unaware that they have been cast because of their links with action films of the eighties and nineties. Their familiarity as names and faces is part of the predictably generic. Sexy Beast feels both to acknowledge that demand and to resist it, as though it wanted to make a British gangster film at a time when it had become a saturated trend (Gangster No 1, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Rancid Aluminium etc.). 

        Glazer was coming from commercials and MTV videos; well-respected in those fields but these are areas usually offering images that function off a high level of inevitable predictability: the work has to tell a story in a few seconds or minutes. In Sexy Beast, Glazer uses this skill positively at the beginning of the film as a huge boulder rolls down a hill and just misses Gal, before landing in his swimming pool and smashing the pool’s tiles. Showing us the rock’s point of view as it works its way down towards Gal, Glazer then shows us the rock from behind moving towards him, and also the rock landing in the water before cutting to the oblivious Gal now soaked from the splash. It could have been a brilliant advert for health and safety (don’t build your home close to loose rock formations) or an amusing one for beer (it could have been a barrel rolling down the mountain and resembling the barrel chest belonging to Gal). But here it is no more than a precursor to narrative events and part of an image structure that will include later another swimming pool — the one Gal and others use in London as they break into the bank next door to the baths. They access it by swimming under the pool with diving gear and drilling from a tunnel into the bank’s security vault. Yet initially we see it as a harbinger and, sure enough, shortly after the boulder incident, Logan visits, as if the lucky escape Gal had with the rock will be followed by the misfortunate of ever having got involved with Don.  

          Central to the film’s achievement is its ability to be self-conscious without quite falling into the self-reflexive, with Sexy Beast finally more preoccupied with its form than insistent over its genre awareness. In its playing with the time frame it may resemble Steven Soderbergh’s gangster film with Terence Stamp, The Limey (which was itself indebted to John Boorman’s Point Blank), but it is as if the form has been absorbed rather than the tropes played up. The difference lies in formal detail over narrative expectation. The gangster film has many tropes a viewer comes to expect: a friend one betrays, an initiating ritual into a violent world, material extravagance, a developing drug habit, paranoia and ruining one’s domestic life. The more a film knowingly acknowledges or inevitably uses such tropes, the more aware the viewer will be of the gangster film they are watching —and many a good one uses almost all of the above, including Scarface and Good Fellas. But most gangster films also find a form to match the expectation as they play up pace, while Glazer plays on slowness, creating instead of an accelerated momentum, a geometric fixity closer to a stage play: “I had to be architectural about it, and keep the second act absolutely angular.”(Indiewire) It gives to the film the tension of theatre and this might have been again why Kingsley is such good casting. When Glazer says “You know the rhythms in a Pinterish way — and the brutality of the dialogue informs everything”, we should remember of course that Betrayal was written by Pinter, taken from his own play. By emphasising the stillness of Kingsley and offering a form that reflects this, the director and his writers, Louis Mellis and David Scinto, want to find in the gangster film its psychology. “I was trying to get Ben to be as still as possible through the entire film.” (IndieWire) Though Pinter wrote more than twenty scripts he never wrote a gangster film (even though he appeared as one in Jez Butterworth’s Mojo); nevertheless, much of his work can seem a closer cousin to the genre than we might initially believe, with the Pinteresque possessing often a complex zero-sum game. Even in Betrayal, about a man cheating with his best friend's wife, told over several years and in reverse order, Pinter manages to convey less the friendship than the rivalry, with the film’s final (and chronologically initial) irony resting on how little the adulterer knows next to the cuckold. Irons as the one who betrays his friend ends up feeling more put out than the one cheated upon. There is almost no violence in the film except a slap Kingsley administers to his wife, in the film's opening sequence and viewed through a window — we can’t hear what is said. But throughout, the film offers a sense of menace greater than any deed to match it.

      Sexy Beast has an aspect of this threatening violence even if the film contains scenes where it is fully manifest: in Kingsley’s murder and later when Teddy kills Harry. Glazer manages to convey that violence isn’t a punctuated release from tension but if anything its exacerbation. With Kingsley dead, this doesn’t mean the problem has gone away — it is quite possible it has only just started, since Don hasn’t casually popped over to Spain to visit an old friend; he is there on the behest of others who want Gal back in London. Equally, when Gal witnesses Harry killed by Terry, he becomes aware of how violent Teddy can be and knows that Teddy suspects he is hiding Don’s death. He is alive only because Teddy never much cared for Logan, but the viewer might believe that Teddy would kill Gal for lying to him. Throughout, Glazer wants to create fixed frames and minimal camera movements to indicate that what matters is what is going on in people’s heads more than what they are doing with their bodies. Though the film offers plenty rapid shots, they are often reserved for the London scenes, while in Spain the image matches much more the geometry of the house Gal has bought.  

     Sure, in Spain, there are moments like a point of view shot from Aitch’s and Jackie’s perspective as they come to the restaurant dinner table that indicates something untoward; and the camera following Gal as he hears Logan returning to his villa after failing to return to London, while the camera retreats in front of Logan, followed by a zoom shot as Don goes up the villa’s steps. But the film’s purpose is the opposite of the frenetic. Partly what gives the film its stillness is Gal’s reluctance to get involved. It isn’t uncommon for a heist film to show someone at the end of their career, pulling off one last robbery or willing to come out of retirement for one final job: it is almost a genre unto itself: Heat, Thief, Drive, Layer Cake, Baby Driver. But Sexy Beast never quite gives us the thrill of the chase, with even the inventive heist given relatively little screen time. While in Rififi, The Red Circle and Heat, the films moves towards the robbery, Sexy Beast all but retreats from it, embedding the action within the main body of the film which concerns Logan’s arrival, his murder and the cover-up. Glazer conveys more fear over Teddy taking out Gal if he finds out exactly what happened to Logan than excitement over stealing vast sums of money by using underwater drilling equipment to break into the bank. Some might see a misplaced sense of priorities, others will see that this is where the film’s originality lies — perhaps paradoxically given that the robbery itself is hardly a standard heist.

              However, if we are right to assume that the film is psychologically inflected rather than action-oriented then what counts isn’t to master the logistics of the action but the geometry of human interaction as Glazer insistently frames to suggest what is going on in someone’s head. It is there when Logan arrives and asks Gal about the villa, saying it seems a bit isolated. Gal says not at all without quite disagreeing with Don; more proposing a broader perspective on things than Logan can initially see. We first witness Don frontally in medium long shot, then in medium close up and then more tightly, before Glazer reverses the angle as we see him ramrod straight from behind. All the while, the film cuts back and forth between Logan and the others, making talk so small that it becomes as tight as Logan’s white, short-sleeve shirt. If we have seen Gal at the beginning, letting it all hang out as he lounged at the pool in yellow trunks a couple of sizes too small for his now widening girth, Don likes everything hemmed in, and his presence has turned the loose-tongued team of Gal, his wife and their best friends tight-lipped. If Pinter’s dialogue had a filmic form (perhaps best captured in his work with Joseph Losey), this would be close to it (and we might have wished that Glazer had adapted Betrayal over David Jones). Gangster dialogue is usually propulsive, moving the story forward because everybody within the film has the same purpose, but Sexy Beast might have the laziest opening of any gangster work, as though it didn’t want to emphasise the gangster genre at all. As Glazer says, “in a way, it was trying to be a film that wasn’t about a gangster.” (Indiewire)

       However, if we are correct to see the film as an exploration of the psychology of the gangster film, then it is good on the gangster mindset, as if trying to extricate thought from action better to show thought at work. This is again, the Pintereseque aspect: to illustrate underlying violence more than its actualisation, in contrast to Scorsese or De Palma’s approach in Good Fellas or Scarface, for example, where the level of violence becomes almost comedic. This isn’t because the films fail; it is instead that the characters achieve startling degrees of brutal success, and the films then show the violent excess as they become more and more established. One of the problems with some of the British gangster films of the late 90s/early 2000s is that they took that violence as the raison d’être of the genre, played up the aggression and expected absurdist self-consciousness to pass for good faith. They were doing violence as comedy and expected the viewer to have a good time no matter the terrors the characters were undergoing, with no film more representative, nor more commercially successful, than the vacuous Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Guy Ritchie’s film makes violence light while Glazer's makes dialogue heavy, trying to find in frame, physical form and the spoken word the components that can suggest the underlying principle out of which violence comes. If most gangster film violence is situational, if it is produced out of the ambitions and drives of the characters, then the root of the aggression isn’t so important unless we have to remind ourselves that these are exceptionally violent people, willing to get what they want by harming those who are in their way. If Scorsese, De Palma and others normalised violence, then along came Ritchie and Tarantino to glamourise it, making it comedically cool. We needn’t attack especially Scorsese for this trajectory even if no film more than GoodFellas acknowledged the absurd circumstances gangsters would find themselves in going about their work. Murdering and burying people can be a hungry business, and who wouldn’t want a plate of meatballs and spaghetti afterwards? You take a liking to a girl and the neighbour tries to get handsy with her; of course, you beat him to within a couple of inches of his existence? Scorsese brilliantly shows us people who try having regular lives within their irregular actions — they take so much further the tensions and conflicts that are part of daily life and the viewer is left flabbergasted by the normalisation. But glamorisation is something else; it asks us to expect the worst and gleefully accept it. There is an enormous difference between the two even if one may seem inevitably have led to the other.

     Sexy Beast in this sense backtracks: it wishes to find in the mind of gangsters the wariness that comes with stillness, and so Gal is in easy retirement when he receives an uneasy visit from Logan. In glamourised gangster violence, it isn’t threatening; it is gleefully anticipated — the film would disappoint with its non-violence if it didn’t actualise the tension. Sexy Beast may at moments activate the brutality but it doesn’t seem a condition of the filmic experience; it is already there in the ferocity of language. When Logan insults Gal or his wife, each verbal claim is like a physical blow, with Gal or Deedee, Aitch or Jackie flinching in response. Sometimes it doesn’t even need to be an insult; Logan generates tension merely by his presence and whatever he happens to be saying. During the evening after his arrival that afternoon, the five of them are sitting around in conversation and Logan tells Jackie she has a nice voice, a nice telephone voice; sounds like she worked in an office, as he asks if she ever worked in an office and repeats she has a nice telephone voice — before saying he worked in an office, when he was seventeen. The repetition of the words office and telephone, and the pauses in the conversation that show Logan in complete control of the environment, are briefly broken by Deedee when Logan says he worked in an office when he was seventeen and asks if people were surprised. Deedee wonders if he is asking that they are surprised he was once seventeen and the camera cuts back to Logan, and he slowly moves his head from looking in the direction of Jackie to Deedee. If looks could kill, then Logan has mastered the assassin’s gaze as it would be impossible not to feel uncomfortable by the slow and steady rotation of the look, like the turret of a tank aiming its sights. When Glazer insisted “we had Ray for Gary and we were looking for his opposite number. Physicality is very importantto me - I knew I couldn't go bigger than Ray Winstone to get the sense of physical conflict I needed so I'd have to go smaller.” (Sight and Sound) 

      But even more Glazer needed to go sharper, with Kingsley the classically trained Shakespearian actor against the instinctively forceful Winstone. When Gal speaks here he almost yawns out the words, his chubby body met by a flabby use of language that the springy, alert Logan won’t tolerate. When Don tries to persuade Gal to take on the job, Gal says don’t do this and Logan says do what. “This”, Gal says, and what this is, is language; he uses words to destroy other people's bodies as we watch Gal, Deedee, Aitch and Jackie’s nerves twitching in his company. One scene shows Aitch apparently disagreeing with Logan when he refuses to take money for a meal. Whether it is a compliment he offers, a meal that he insists on paying for, or trying to persuade Gal to take part in a robbery, there is no rhetorical difference between them. He uses language constantly as a battering ram, breaking other people’s nervous systems all the better to assert his will. Logan is no doubt a violent man, but he manages to convey in his assertiveness that violence isn’t a last resort — it is just another tool at his disposal, and likely to be used as much out of frustration with himself as in trying to convince another of his prowess. He achieves the latter just by walking into a room. When he bottles Gal it seems no worse than calling him a flabby cunt or reminding Gal that Deedee is an ex-porn star. It is names rather than sticks and stones that can really hurt because when offered by someone like Logan, they sting deep. They are properly corrosive: third-degree burns as insult. At last, when Don gets physical it galvanises everyone into action. First, the pool boy turns up and threatens Logan before the rifle is taken out of the boy’s hand, before Deedee turns her rifle on Don and prepares to blow a hole into him, before the film jumps forward as we see Gal in London, apparently ready to help out in the heist. It is only later in the film view Logan lying in his own blood before Aitch offers the coup de grace with a heavy object. 

     In another film, perhaps like Pulp Fiction or Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, the cut from Deedee about to shoot and Gal in London might seem like a tease, a clever narrative trick to leave us wondering what happened. But instead, it seems like an ellipsis there to make us accept that Deedee will have killed Logan and to leave us wondering why exactly he has decided to take the London job. After all, it looked as if he might have been compelled to take it because of Don’s forcefulness, but with Don surely out of the way, couldn’t he have avoided getting involved? The film puts us back into the psychological rather than the teasingly anticipatory. It is as if the film wants constantly to find the points of psychological tension and intrigue and places the dramatic within that context. It might be fair to say that Sexy Beast’s screenwriters are no Pinters, but that would be premised on the expectations of the Pinteresuqe rather than those of the gangster movie. However, if we see Sexy Beast as a gangster film that more than most has absorbed the menace to be found in some of Pinter’s work, that doesn’t mean it needs to eschew the physically violent completely. It only needs to accept it comes from character as much as from situation, and in casting Kingsley in such a key role we discover it is less about casting against type but casting dead centre in the context of Sexy Beast’s interest in diction as power. As Mark Olsen says, “Sexy Beast sizzles with the rhythms of language unleashed, with the specific forms of violence that only words can convey.” (Film Comment) 


© Tony McKibbin