+ interview with Dennis Farina, starring in Snatch
Guys
Snatch is all about attitude and style. And guys,
lots of guys. Aggressive and jumpy, packed with
brutish hooligans and feckless crooks, it's a guys'
throw-down movie and then some. Its angles are edgy,
its editing is speedy, and its narrative is
progressively nonlinear, to the point that trying to
figure out what happens when becomes mostly
irrelevant. It's not concerned with cause and effect
or even any actual events per se. It's focused on how
those events come off on screen, how great they look,
or better, how fast they look. As Bad Boy Lincoln
(played by the supercool drum and bass guy Goldie),
puts it when asked to dispose of a one-armed corpse,
"I create the bodies, I don't erase the bodies." Okay
then. Show me the bodies.
Writer-director Guy Ritchie certainly knows a bit
about such showmanship (even aside from his
all-show-all-the-time marriage). His first feature,
1998's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, was a
similar thrill-ride of a movie, a clever bit of
low-budget neo-violence involving similar characters,
similar intertwining subplots that come together in a
tumultuous crescendo, and several of the same actors,
including former U.K. football star Vinnie Jones,
Jason Statham, Jason Flemyng, and Alan Ford, and
introducing new-blood U.S. stars, like Brad Pitt and
Benicio Del Toro.
Snatch is more of everything -- more characters,
more bumbling, more hysteria, more money, more bodies.
The po-mo aesthetic choices (and even some of the plot
points) obviously derive from previous guy films, not
only Lock, Stock, but also Trainspotting and the
Tarantino oeuvre. The minimal storyline stems from a
diamond heist, beautifully introduced under the
opening credits, as a series of video-surveillance
monitor shots that follow a crew of thieves,
disguised as Hasidic Jews and including Franky Four
Fingers (Del Toro), as they make their way into an
Antwerp jewel merchant's office. In a dazzling blast
of fast cuts and zooms, they snatch an 86-carat prize.
From here, these crooks and others make mistake after
mistake, which eventually come together in one
deliriously choreographed sequence of events involving
three or four sets of criminals, all on their way to
get the diamond, either intentionally or by accident.
These events repeat from different perspectives, so
that you can't be sure what happened until you see all
the versions, and even then, well, you might not know
exactly.
As a plainly pleased-with-itself exercise in excess
and spectacle, the film features any number of
eccentric characters and comic-violent climaxes. In
the characters category, Brad Pitt's piker (Irish
gypsy) bare-knuckles boxer, One-Punch Mickey, is
probably the most outrageous. Ritchie says that when
Pitt asked to appear in his next movie (after the
actor saw Lock, Stock), they decided that it would
be grand to remake the heartthrob, who signed on for
much less than his usual $20 million fee, so that he's
physically beat-up and verbally incomprehensible (not
that this is in itself a brainstorm: see also, Pitt's
roles in Fight Club and 12 Monkeys). Mickey is
recruited to take a fall in an illegal bare-knuckle
boxing match by two promoters (Jason Statham's
Turkish, who also serves as our personable narrator,
and Stephen Graham's Tommy), who owe the local
mucky-muck, Brick Top (Alan Ford), a substantial wad
of quid. (Brick Top is instantly characterized by the
fact that he keeps a barn full of pigs, to whom he
feeds the remainders of victims who owed him money.)
As it turns out, Mickey is unable to take this fall,
by virtue of his moral and physical constitution, not
to mention his undying love for his dear "mam," who
bears the brunt of one particular payback scheme. That
he does actually fall, quite spectacularly and in
slow motion, backwards into a surreal ocean of
unconsciousness (made literal in a way that could not
be more obviously indebted to Renton's infamous toilet
swim in Trainspotting), is only a diversion. The
point is, he won't go down, and so he and his anxious
promoters, Tommy and Turkish, find themselves in very
deep "shite."
Somehow and eventually, their predicament intersects
with the diamond business, which was, incidentally,
commissioned by a New York-based gangster, Avi (Dennis
Farina). When that deal goes sour due to Franky's
gambling addiction (indicated by repeated speedy
still-pose montages of him in various states of
discombobulation, and accompanied each time by a snip
of Elvis' "Viva Las Vegas"), Avi jets to London to
retrieve his goods. The plot expands to include a few
small-time London hustlers, the aforementioned
Lincoln, Vinny (Robbie Gee), Sol (Lennie James), and
their first-time getaway driver Tyrone (played by
first-time actor Ade) -- all of whom are black. Their
antics are surely brainless (they use a set of
"replica" guns to take on a professional gunman), and
some critics, most vocally, triphop artist and Bristol
native Tricky, have called out the film for racism,
but truth be told, the film treats most everyone --
the Irish pikers, the British thugs, the Jews -- with
equal disrespect and glib abuse.
As wanker movies go then, Snatch is shrewd and
entertaining. To the extent that it takes up a theme
concerning its population of guys, you might say that
it examines their capacity for distrust. Though they
all have their mates, they also all have definite and
understandable reasons for not trusting anyone, and
for betraying everyone. It's like a whirlwind version
of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, but with more
characters banging about, and fewer insights into
them. To be fair, though, Snatch isn't so much
interested in its characters' psychologies as it is in
their actions and reactions, displayed in amped-up,
double-quick time. That it's the piker (whom most all
of them deride at first, not least for the fact that
they can't understand a word he says) who teaches the
rest of them a thing or two about loyalty and trust
may be something of a moral. But it's probably safer
to say that Snatch leaves the characters'
eccentricities for you to decipher.
MORE FILM