The time has never been riper for a movie like Donnybrook. Its simultaneous attempt to rationalize the malaise of the “white working class” while viewing it under the most stereotypical, condescending lens possible perfectly fits the current pseudo-anthropological fascination with the socially neglected people erroneously credited with Donald Trump’s rise to power. Writer/director Tim Sutton crafts a film steeped in misery, mistaking spare asceticism for Cormac McCarthy-esque profundity. Yet from the jump he overplays his hand: the very first lines of the movie belong to a grizzled old man muttering, “The world’s changed” as he guides our hero, Jarhead Earl (Jamie Bell), down a river like Charon, leading the young man to an underground bare-knuckle fight with a $100,000 cash prize. Earl’s brooding focus on winning the prize, such a paltry sum in contemporary dollars, immediately marks him as desperately poor, and his belief that only violence can deliver him from hardship is equally simplistic, overused material.
The film then flashes back to track the various plots leading up to the donnybrook. We see Earl as a pathetic stick-up man performing petty burglaries to raise the cash for the fight’s entry fee. After holding up a gun store, Earl returns home to find his addict wife, Tammy (Dara Tiller), being attended to her by her dealer, Chainsaw Angus (Frank Grillo). Attempting to beat the man for bringing junk into his home, Earl instead gets savaged in the fight, saved only by the intervention of the dealer’s sister, Delia (Margaret Qualley). The shame of his defeat is presented as further motivation for Earl’s entry into the donnybrook, though in so doing the film squanders whatever point it had wanted to make about the futility of traditional masculine displays to overcome systemic poverty. Earl’s now-personal reasoning for wishing to fight validates his resentful nature, swiftly muddling the film’s tone.
Earl thus becomes a blank figure, a repository for clichés about poverty and obsolete skills. Bell plays the character with all the somber, silent rage that has become a signifier for these kinds of characters, and his flimsiness as a character makes for leaden scenes in the lead-up to the fight. Even Sutton seems to recognize this, as he tracks a number of other figures to pad out Earl’s thin narrative potential. Yet the other characters are all just variations of the protagonist’s own impoverished wrath. A corrupt sheriff (James Badge Dale) roams the film’s periphery, occasionally intersecting with the plot to present a stale vision of a greedy, crooked authority figure. Worst is Chainsaw Angus, whose nightmarish rage is presented as a foil to Earl’s more justifiable anger. Donnybrook gets perilously bogged down with the dealer and Delia, harping on the depravity of their abusive, incestuous existence. All of their scenes lean into pure nihilism, like one in which Chainsaw brutally beats a tied-down man (Pat Healy, fulfilling a seeming contractual obligation to appear in all movies about hyperviolent, economically desperate whites) before Delia dispassionately strips and mounts him, grinding until she climaxes before shooting him, his orgasmic moans turning into groans of fear.
This miserable bleakness is matched by the film’s cinematography, which consists of desaturated pallid gray monochromes, all the better to emphasize the characters’ have-not misery. The only exception to this comes in occasional shots that scan walls of weapons in shops and private collections with loving care, the lighting suddenly golden. Given that the film does not particularly comment on American gun culture, nor does that culture play a significant role in the film’s outlook on violence, these moments come off as preoccupied asides, a glimpse into the filmmaker wanting to make an unrelated point while on a similar but nonetheless different subject. Structurally, the film struggles to progress, constantly reiterating its grim view of violence with tediously repetitive scenes that offer the same superficial insights into the characters’ self-loathing. In the most laughable of such moments, a long take shows Delia, unable to cope with herself, pulling over her car and sticking a pistol in her mouth, holding the gun there with a blank expression on her face until a single tear pools and runs down her cheek.
The overwhelming ponderousness of the film does not pay tribute to forgotten and desperate people but instead turns them into mouthpieces for Sutton’s own projections. Donnybrook aims for the sun-bleached moral reckoning of No Country for Old Men, but the Coen brothers film it most resembles is Barton Fink, with Sutton as the posturing writer seeking to capture “the common man” who exists only in his own mind. This is Hillbilly Elegy meets Fight Club, an attempt to portray the rage begat of hopelessness that instead reduces its characters to flimsy stereotypes who resort to hackneyed behavior to escape the boundaries of their lives. Characters never embody their psychological and contextual horrors; instead, they proclaim them aloud, bemoaning the state of “folks like us” as the film views them every bit as restrictively as the economic forces that bind them.
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