This is a man’s world, where nothing is off-limits, and you’d better be able to dish it out, or you’re going to take an ungodly amount.
Finally. A decade after Sexy Beast changed our perception of Ben Kingsley and became a cult favorite, screenwriter Louis Mellis presents a follow-up of sorts in the form of 44 Inch Chest, which ended its theatrical run earlier this year and was released on DVD recently. Sexy Beast director Jonathan Glazer had no official contribution to this new film, but relative newcomer Malcolm Venville’s style is very similar, and he handles the script equally well. Like Sexy Beast, 44 Inch Chest also stars Ray Winstone and features Ian McShane in an unforgettable supporting role, and it also revolves around a group of career criminals. But unlike Sexy Beast, there is no heist, no criminal activity per se. Instead, the five men — Winstone and McShane are joined by the superb character actors Tom Wilkinson, John Hurt, and Stephen Dillane — are brought together because Colin (Winstone) has just been told by his wife that she’s leaving him, and that she’s been cheating on him. Archie (Wilkinson) hurries to Colin’s home and finds him staring at the ceiling, listening to Harry Nilson’s “I Can’t Live (If Living Is Without You)” on repeat. The house is a mess, with the furniture overturned and dishes and vases smashed. Archie summons the gang, the wife’s “lover boy” is dragged from the restaurant where he works, and everyone convenes in a sort of safe house, where the assumption is that Colin will kill the poor fool.
And so it begins. First the men tease each other in that witty, vile way that only British criminals can. McShane’s character, Meredith, is openly gay, but also patently smart and ruthless, and it’s obvious that he’s the “leader” of the motley crew. He and John Hurt’s character (who goes by the marvelous name Old Man Peanut) rag on each other throughout the movie, with the more passive Archie (who still lives with his mother) and the cunning Mal (Dillane) chiming in less frequently, but with competing helpings of wit and cruelty. And the cruelty leaves no one unscathed. Each man has his turn as the target of the barbs, and each fights back. The point is, this is a man’s world, where nothing is off-limits, and you’d better be able to dish it out, or you’re going to take an ungodly amount.
To me this type of movie sits somewhere between the classic, gritty portrayals of the British underworld (as seen in The Long Good Friday) and the hyper-stylized, comedic trounces through the same territory (as seen in Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels). Sexy Beast was a microscopic examination of a handful of criminals in all of their violent, yet charming, glory, and it took a classic heist plot (the retired master thief being recruited for one big score) and strips it down to a bare bones battle of wills: Ben Kingsley’s evil, macho manipulator (referred to as his “anti-Gandhi” role in the press at the time) versus Winstone’s laid back — but decisive — peacemaker. Kingsley got the Oscar nomination, but Winstone’s performance was equally nuanced and intriguing, and McShane nearly stole the film in his role as the heist mastermind and all-around hedonist Teddy Bass. These three men, along with Winstone’s friend and fellow retired criminal played by Cavan Kendall, presented an endlessly fascinating study of the ways these professional criminals interact with each other, constantly assessing and reassessing their abilities to get what they want. 44 Inch Chest picks up this thread beautifully, and even does away with the criminality almost entirely, which serves to draw the viewer into the claustrophobic plot with eyes wide open. With nothing to pay attention to but these men’s relationships to each other and to Lover Boy — who stands in as a surrogate challenge to their codified way of life — the nuances are given proper attention, and the study that the film represents is fully realized and engaging.
Soon the men turn their focus to the Lover Boy. The verbal assault is aimless but stinging. Their insults range from the unbelievably crude, emasculating, and complex to the basest one-word denouncements, often expressed with such vitriol that you get the impression that Old Man Peanut (or Mal) genuinely feels offended on behalf of all humanity — or at least all men. Meredith, for his part, amuses himself with word games, taking cues from Old Man Peanut’s tirades and turning them into bon mots that neither offend, attack, or in any way affect the conversation except (I imagine) to further confuse Lover Boy. The scene is incredible in its witty banter, something Tarantino would admire greatly.
Then Colin asks to be alone with Lover Boy, and the rest of the gang steps into a hallway to bullshit with each other. They swap stories about escapades while Colin tries to piece himself together — he’s been largely inconsolable and incoherent — to ask the young man some important questions. But instead of talking to him, he talks at him, unburdening himself of his confusion, explaining himself, his incredulousness at his wife’s actions — almost everything. Almost, but not quite. He also begins to hallucinate, and in this way the viewer is brought into Colin’s mind, where divergent scenarios play themselves out on screen. They’re eerie scenes, and it takes some time to understand what’s real and what’s not, but they shortly prove themselves to be alternate realities when the characters begin taking on new, as-yet-unseen personalities. To be sure, it’s mostly to Venville’s credit that this works so well, but the actors certainly made it possible in their individual ways, by allowing their postures and facial expressions to say so much about their personalities that Colin’s imagined actions are entirely plausible, even in the hyperbolic world of dreams and visions.
The ending is neither shocking nor predictable, but rather somewhere in between. Ultimately I don’t believe the film’s moral center of gravity rests in Colin’s actions. 44 Inch Chest may specifically and overtly be about one man’s ability to parse his new role as cuckold, and his decision is the unspoken focal point, but the film is also about masculinity, about each man’s interpretation of what it means to be a man, and thus about his projected image of himself, and the inevitable problems these shifting notions can create — especially when they run up against other men.
