Why 'Dead Man's Shoes' Just Plain Works

There comes a moment during Shane Meadows' Dead Man's Shoes where I should have cried foul. Should have cried it at the top of my lungs, through a megaphone, and then posted a blog which simple read "FOUL!"
However, this was not the case. I won't spoil the movie by saying just what it was that happened, but I will tell you why you should see the movie. Consider this a love letter to a movie that manages to succeed where so many others fail, all because of the strength of its characters.
I'll begin with the plot, though.
Richard returns to his sleepy British town from his stint in the royal military to exact revenge upon the gang of people who took advantage of his mentally retarded younger brother. Simple enough, but loaded with enough emotional potential to raise it above it's single-sentence plot outline.
To pigeonhole this movie into a genre, it would most likely have to be either called a slasher or a revenge flick. It involves a 'righteous' individual who goes after the 'bad people' who hurt his vulnerable brother in his absence. It also involves a group of people terrorized by a murderer. Already astute readers will be able to see the conflict at the heart of these two statements.
In a lesser movie the group of individuals under the knife of the avenger would be purely evil, growing only more enraged and dangerous as they are winnowed away. Dead Man's Shoes is too clever for this, however. Instead of a group of rabid devils we get a very common and comically benign druggies. These men aren't dealing smack to children and killing families - they sit in a room, talking about sex, getting high and pondering life's little inanities. Imagine your college roommate, ten years later, still hanging around in a small apartment with a pot-leaf tapestry draped over the couch. They are sympathetic in their complete and utter inanity.
Then there is Richard. Instead of a random bloke who becomes supernaturally adept at killing people, he is a trained fighter who suddenly turns his deadly skills against a new enemy. His hair is grown out a bit, slightly beyond the high and tight style favored by most militarizes. His beard is shaggy, unkempt, about as fair grown as his hair. He is a soldier recently removed from the field, still keeping all of his skills, in a new environment, growing from his old life into his life of vengeance. Instead of a mask bought from a Halloween shop, he uses a gas mask from his days in the forces. He is always who he is and was, never how a standard plot would make him.
What is most intelligent about this film is how it spends time with its characters. Richard, played with staggering and frightening intensity by Paddy Considine, gets very minimal screen time for someone who is, ostensibly, the protagonist of the movie. He creates, with this limited time, a character who exudes himself through his skin like a fog. You can see his violent intensity in his eyes, his rage in his movements, and his madness in his voice. If we were to spend too much time with his character, we might lose the ability to see him as a tortured avenger, and only see him as a vicious killer.
To fill this void we get an extended amount of time with the posse of druggies. In flashbacks we are shown their violence, their cruelty. In present, we are shown their fear, their inability to grasp the consequences of their actions. These are men who have made mistakes, who have done wrongs, and who desperately want to escape them. Their past wrongs were committed out of ignorance in the name of a good time. Their current wrongs are done out of fear, in the name of self preservation. There is nothing we do that we can't understand, because in the end these are real people. No Hollywood beasts exist in this movie.
Add to these well-drawn characters the universally laudable performances. No false notes are struck, no out-of-character moments created. In this way alone the film could have succeeded.
The directing is likewise exemplary. The camera work is naturalistic, while each scene is granted a sense of menace through the use of a dreary, sodden English town as a setting. Nothing flashy or tricky is done in the name of cheap thrills. We get the view of a party who is standing there, watching it all happen. The music is fitting and yet unobtrusive. It is vaguely spooky, coming in only in rare moments, and is always constant. If a scene starts off with serene composition, the music doesn't shift violently from down-played instrumentals to blaring guitars and sirens, even if a body is discovered.
One of the best scenes, in my opinion, comes in the form of the gang's first interaction with Richard after he spends a night playing pranks on them to get their attention. The acting, directing, and writing of this scene are all pitch perfect, and encompass what makes this movie so wonderful.
The gang's leader, Sonny (Gary Stretch), steps up to Richard, trying to intimidate him, to get him to admit to what he's done, but Richard reacts in a surprising and genre-defying way.
Sonny: You know, the lads have this ridiculous idea--
Richard: Yeah, it was me.
There is no mystery to all this. Richard makes no attempt to hide his anger and his threat. In a lesser movie the killer always hides himself in the shadows. Meanwhile, Richard tells them it was him, tells them where he lives, and takes it a step further.
Sonny: You're not afraid of me, are ya?
(Richard smiles and shakes his head no)
Sonny: You're making me very nervous, Richard.
Richard: Well you should be...because I'm gonna fucking hit you all.
Sonny: I don't like being threatened, Richard.
Richard: I'm not threatening you, mate. It's beyond fucking words. I watched over you when you were asleep. I looked at your fucking neck, and was that far away from slicing it.
A letter of intent from a killer. Refreshing in its honesty and true sense of dread. It is also another insight into Richard's mindset; he doesn't care about being found out, doesn't want to get away with it scott-free.
I could go on forever, but like any good movie, especially a slasher/revenge picture, the twists and turns are best discovered freshly upon viewing.
Dead Man's Shoes is the perfect example of a small movie with seemingly familiar elements that creates something that feels entirely new because of the immense skill put behind its characters, acting, writing and directing.
There's no need to cry foul, but rather, "It's good!"

Winking at the Audience, or: How Michael Haneke completely unnerved me during 'Funny Games'

I am used to watching movies in a very static way. I don't like interuptions from other audience members; I don't like mobiles ringing, I don't like snide comments directed at the screen, nor loud popcorn-chewing, and I especially don't like when someone nudges me and says "wasn't that wicked?"
Distractions in general are annoying. When certain people - like myself - watch a movie they want to be engrossed in the experience. So when something like this breaks the spell it is irritating and unwelcome.
Funny Games, by Michael Haneke and starring Ulrich Mühe, is a movie that distracts and disrupts you on its own, but to a very different result.
The film is directed with a level of detachment and calm that is completely at odds with its subjects, long takes and unblinking passivity juxtaposed against a very real and frantic situation. A family is being maliciously harassed by a pair of bored and egocentric youths who have subtly and weirdly entered their vacation home. Pain, death, psychological torment, violence, sadism - all these thing, if given the Hollywood Treatment, would have been formatted around shaky-cams, quick edits, eerie and insulting soundtracks, and things that randomly emerge from out of the camera's frame of view. In this movie, however, there are no tricks like that. The only music comes from car stereos and a family's sound system (save for a very real exception during the opening credits). The camera seems static. It sometimes doesn't shift focus from the players for what seems like an eternity. It sees everything and reacts to nothing.
Yet a different kind of trick is used that makes this movie so teasingly unnerving that at first you barely notice it.
It begins when one of the tormentors, known sometimes as Paul (Arno Frisch), asks Anna (Sussanne Lothar), the mother, to find the family dog. He follows her, playing the game Hot or Cold with her, teasing her as she searches. "Hot... cold...warmer...warmer...burning..." Soon enough she is approaching the family vehicle which is placed directly in front of the camera. Paul stands in view, back to the camera, watching her. Then he turns and winks at the camera.
It happens and you barely notice it. If you do notice it you don't really know what to make of it. Until this point we've just been witnesses, safely separated by the fourth wall. Nothing is supposed to come back to us, because the characters do not know we are there. So when Paul winks at us, at you, the effect is a bit off putting. But unlike an annoying audience member, you keep watching because this is intriguing, it is meant to be. It means something.
Later on, when the whole family is being briefed by their captors as to what is going to happen, Paul makes a bet. He bets that they won't be alive by early morning. They family is terrified, and cannot say how they will bet, so Paul decides to ask someone else. Once again he turns to the camera, smiles convivially, and asks us how we will bet. Now the fourth wall isn't just breached - it's been burned down. As though you were peeping through a hole in a shower curtain and suddenly the bather decides to tear down the curtain to let you know that, yes, they knew you were watching and, yes, they want you to keep watching.
It's perverse, this intrusion into our lives. We came to watch a movie, not to be called into play. We like horror movies and so-called "torture porn" because we are safely shielded from the scrutiny of those we are watching. What do we do when they want us to join in, when they so smugly assure us that they know we are there?
We keep watching, shamed into further viewing by our hosts.
It goes one step further, however. Paul tells us, "You're on their side," which is true, we want them, at least one of them, to escape. "So," he goes on, "who do you bet with?" And there is the real question. When we watch these movies, when we know we will see people harmed, why do we root for them to escape? Aren't we watching to see our heroes be destroyed? We are on their side, of course, because they are us, but would we really bet on them surviving?
So as the family's lives are shattered, as they are tortured and beaten and terrorized, we watch on and desire nothing more than the end.
Haneke is not without his sense of irony.
Soon enough Paul responds to Anna and her husband Georg's (Ulrich Mühe) pleading for an end to it all. "We're not up to feature film length yet."
By this point we the audience don't care. This isn't fun anymore. This isn't a movie, this is an admonishment against our own desire to see pain inflicted on others through the safety of our television sets. But we keep watching, because it is a movie, it is only fake, and we are invested in these characters and their fates.
I am tempted beyond all reason to explain the final, wicked, vindictive twist that shows us just how far these captors will go to deliver what they believe to be a satisfactory end to the story to us, the viewer, but I will not. If you watch this movie - and you should - you will know it when it comes. No amount of foreshadowing of fourth-wall-busting can prepare you for it. It's a moment when we cheer, puzzle, and then cry out in shock.
Very rarely do movies entertain at the same time that they comment on the film form itself. (For another fine example, though less sadistic, see The Prestige) but Funny Games does just this. But it also adds on another layer.
This is a movie that is in-tune with a modern desire to see violence done upon its people. Not real violence, but fak violence. Hostel, Saw, Touristas, these movies give us the carnal satisfaction some of us want. Funny Games leads us in with this promise, but then delivers a wind-knocking punch to the stomach that shows us a darker face to these movies. When we watch these sorts of films, or any film, we aren't simple viewers - we are complicit with the evil forces that drive the plot, as much to blame for any characters' suffering as those who inflict it in the movie itself.

Violence as Language in 'Goodfellas'

I fell in love with GoodFellas when Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) repeatedly hit a man in the face with a pistol.
Henry has just driven home his girlfriend, Karen (Lorraine Bracco) after a neighbor of hers left her on the side of the road when she refused his insistent sexual advances. The camera takes in the scene in one shot. It watches as Henry crosses the street with lethal purpose in his stride, then it turns to view the cocksure stance of Henry's quarry, the offending neighbor. When the two collide the neighbor fires out a quick threat with suitable assurance in his voice, "What do you want, fucko, you want somethin', eh?" Henry - not even seeming to notice his opponent's words, - grabs the neighbor by the hair and proceeds to smash his snub-nosed revolver into the man's face a staggering ten times.
Then Henry threatens him.
Martin Scorsese has created in this scene an abbreviated version of the entire message of his film.
Goodfellas is not so much a narrative as it is a character study of the mob. We are not shown single people doing single things; we are shown characters interacting with many characters and the way in which these actions echo throughout the world and life of the mob. For us as viewers, this creates a full and real sense of the mob as its own separate society. A society where violence takes the place of argument, and the only way to mask your fear of those around you is through respect and devotion.
In truth, it might be said that those in the movie feel the fear but do not know it as such, they believe it really is respect and devotion.
Take, for instance, Henry's wife Karen. Karen witnesses the entirety of Henry's attack on her neighbor, and is even asked by Henry to hide the gun he used to beat the man. In voice over we hear Karen's thoughts as he looks at the bloody pistol in her hands: "I know there are women like my best friend who would have gotten out of there the minute their boyfriend gave them a gun to hide. But I didn't. I gotta admit the truth: it turned me on." She then hides the gun in a box next to a glass milk bottle, which segues perfectly into the next scene when a wine glass is folded in linen and crushed. They are married.
Karen is seduced by the casual violence her boyfriend shows, his lack of concern for normal society when dealing with her attacker. In the same way, Henry as a young boy is seduced by the way the mobsters operate, their shirking of the rules, their ease of dominance. The way people pay them respect because shootings and beatings take the place of threats and promises.
Scorsese's theme of violence as language is achieved on a very subtle level, avoiding long exposition and showmanship in favor of style. There is no fabricated moral center who explains the corruption of the world to us, only the camera watching every event with equal intimacy and care. Violence in Goodfellas is captured with the same photographic personality as conversations in a coffee shop. Music never augments the act, but rather the casual nature of the act.
The jukebox music in the scene in which Tommy (Joe Pesci) and Jimmy (Robert DeNiro) assault a man in the bar is a simple tune, a catchy number that would have been heard in a bar in the time period. The music remains, unaltered by the violence, as unflappable as the characters. There is no reason to treat violence in the film differently stylistically from conversation because to the characters it is no difference. Murder is an argument you win.
In this way Joe Pesci creates perhaps the greatest orator of violence in the mob in his character Tommy. Nearly every scene he is in is punctuated by an act of violence. Tommy approaches physical brutality not as a man acquainted with language, but as someone in love with the sound of his own voice. He shoots a man in the foot for not bringing him a drink, smashes a bottle against a man's head for asking him to pay his bill. If he hadn't joined the mob he'd have been a serial killer.
This is, of course, not to forget the technical and theatrical virtues of the film. The acting, editing, long-takes, and the use of music is all top-notch. But the true allure of this movie is how all of these things gather together to create a convincing collage which our minds can piece into a convincing portrait of a world most of us will never know.
Scorsese wields cinema so expertly and confidently that when he hits me with image after image of violence and immorality, I become the victim, the witness, and the perpetrator. I feel shocked, awed, and intoxicated by it all.