“What are you doing?”
“Stepping on diamonds. It’s taboo. I hope the genies get pissed off.”
It’s not exactly Harold Pinter, but that exchange between a wealthy London couple (Jessica Chastain and Ralph Fiennes) captures the cynical, caustic tone that writer-director John Michael McDonagh takes on in The Forgiven adapted from a novel by Lawrence Osborne. With a terrific cast and gorgeous setting, this story of bourgeois travelers in Morocco seems like a scathing update of a Paul Bowles novel, but with no grand themes. People are terrible, but the truth is, terrible people can be fairly entertaining.
Central to this dessert drama are Jo (Chastain) and David (Fiennes), on a weekend trip to a decadent party thrown by their friend Richard (Matt Smith) with his lover Dally (an under-utilized Caleb Landry Jones). On some dark road on the way to their friends’ remote villa, David, who’s driving drunk, picks yet another fight with his wife. A local boy, hoping to sell the tourists an expensive fossil, suddenly jumps in front of their sports car and is killed.
David at first shows no remorse—he steps on those carpet diamonds precisely because he remembers seeing diamond tattoos on the boy’s hands, that’s how little his conscience bothers him. David and his friends hope to just bury the incident in the sand, but when the boy’s elderly father is found, David reluctantly agrees to go to their village, where the drunk-driver can attend to the boy’s funeral. Which leaves Jo in the lurch—but not for long. She’s very briefly concerned that David will end up the violent victim of the father’s revenge. But she lets a flirtation with fellow traveler (Christopher Abbot) turn serious (not a spoiler—you see it coming a mile away), and she’s soon like, ”David who?”
McDonagh (Calvary) doesn’t write dialogue as sparkling as his little brother Martin (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) does, but The Forgiven does tap similar themes, and it’s all in the title. If the Billboards script redeemed a seemingly unredeemable figure, The Forgiven tries to do the same, with mixed results. David does change his stripes after a fashion, but the character development, despite a strong performance from Fiennes, doesn’t seem completely believable, especially when the script has spent so much time installing literary billboards over the heads of every character pointing in flashing neon lights, This Is A Terrible Person.
The Forgiven is set today, with cell phone coverage a minor plot point, but it often feels like a kind of “Mad Men” field trip, and even invokes Elvis movies, with a poolside scene of bikini-clad partiers depicting the depths of Western hedonism. It’s a bit obvious, but everything and everybody looks so good you don’t really care. But by the end, you start to feel as cynical as the party guests, and the unsurprising plot twist that closes the movie is worth little more than a shrug.
“The world is a dreadful place, my father used to say,” David says in the middle of his journey of atonement. “The best you can do is make fun of it.” The trouble is, The Forgiven doesn’t make enough fun of its dreadful people. Do you have a better way to spend two hours than watch beautiful people behave badly and learn nothing? Probably; but if this Moroccan mystery travelogue is empty entertainment, it’s still effective entertainment.
Photo courtesy of Roadside Attractions
The post The Forgiven appeared first on Spectrum Culture.