Martin McDonagh, the man behind the thrillingly dark crime-comedy (cromedy?) In Bruges, is back after four years with his new film Seven Psychopaths. Just as dark and somehow even more violent and funny than In Bruges, the story follows Marty (played by Colin Farrell who also starred in In Bruges) a writer attempting to finish his screenplay Seven Psychopaths. Yes, you read that right: It’s a movie about a screenwriter – named after the director himself – struggling to finish his screenplay, which also just happens to be the title of the movie.
Marty’s about to get a lot of real-life inspiration, though, when Billy (played by Sam Rockwell), his best friend and an unemployed actor who keeps his pockets full by stealing dogs on the side and then returning them to their owners for the reward money, takes it upon himself to put an ad out calling for any and all psychopaths. Things get really hairy when Billy and Hans (played by Christopher Walken), Billy’s dognapping-partner-in-crime, accidentally steal the dog of Charlie (played by Woody Harrelson), a man who truly embodies the word psychopath with his entire being.
As anyone can tell from the premise, Seven Psychopaths is an incredibly meta film, and McDonagh is completely aware of this. It’s actually pretty darn amazing that he manages to pull off the whole thing so well. A film that focuses on a character that’s writing a script – that mirrors the movie that the audience is watching – and the events that he experiences are then incorporated into his script, which we in turn experience by witnessing the whole thing? It sounds like a disaster waiting to happen, but one that actually turns out to be an amazing film with its own moral code.
It certainly speaks to McDonagh’s storytelling prowess, and while he’ll have people laughing at his quick one-liners such as “You can’t kill the animals in the movies, only the women,” the film actually takes on a deeper meaning once you let yourself come down from the – albeit incredibly violent – high of watching blood, guns and pure, comedic terror. Also, when you stop and think about it, that line actually does tell one of the sad truths about films and basically every other method of storytelling: Female characters are treated like shit.
In fact, that’s the biggest issue with Seven Psychopaths. The women don’t get that much screen time, and when they are onscreen, they’re nothing more than mere plot devices. It’s enough to make a person wonder why Abbie Cornish and Olga Kurylenko are even on the poster. I asked McDonagh if he purposely did this to go along with the meta concept of the film (by having a male character state that “women characters are awful” and then have that be the case in the film), or if there was a different reason for it. Apparently there were several extra scenes with both Abbie’s character, Kaya, and Olga’s character, Angel, that were cut that will “be on the DVD extras,” but he did admit that “[he] could’ve done better.” It does seem like McDonagh is trying to make up for this, though, as he called his next script his “proper get-out-of-jail card” as it features “a really strong 55-year-old woman lead who’s like the toughest thing you’ve ever seen.” I don’t know about anyone else, but knowing that McDonagh’s next film is going to have an awesome female protagonist makes me incredibly happy and excited.
When you forget about the women in the film, though, Seven Psychopaths does have its moments, as McDonagh uses it as a way of “trying to question guns and violence…but not to be preachy about it.” And it definitely succeeds in doing that. I distinctly remember sitting in the theater and thinking to myself, "This is exactly why we need better gun control laws. We let complete psychopaths have easy access to weapons, and that is absolutely terrifying." So it was pretty amazing when I talked with McDonagh and realized that this specific reaction I had was a result of him purposely adding a subtle morality to the story and presenting the violence in a way that didn’t glorify it.
In fact, his whole idea of the different moral codes that people have, which is present in both In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths, is incredibly interesting. Anyone who's watched In Bruges will have noticed the humanizing layer McDonagh added to Ralph Fiennes’ character Harry. This same sort of humanization can be seen in Seven Psychopaths with – who else? – the psychopaths, making the movie all the more compelling as the characters become more dynamic and surprising. When asked why he wrote his characters like this, McDonagh replied, “I think it’s just more about not seeing anyone as a psychopath, but seeing them all as human. And I think that was true of especially Ralph Fiennes’ character in In Bruges, as violent and as warped as his character is, he’s got a very defined code, and it’s probably a very defined moral code, too, [but] it’s not our kind of moral code. Maybe it’s you guys.” I laughed at that bit, which just goes to show how McDonagh has the ability to combine the serious with the humorous – and then the ability to also translate that to the screen.
It’s also clear from how he talks about the issues of morality that he has an amazing grasp on the somewhat skewed morality of his characters, commenting that “you can still see the logic of it, and it’s interesting to set up characters whose logic is different to yours, like Tom Waits’ character [Zachariah]. He has done extraordinarily dark things, but if he still has his own logic, that can take the story to an interesting place.”
This idea of having one’s own morality definitely springs from a personal place. McDonagh added that his own moral code “is probably screwed like Ralph Fiennes’ [character Harry in In Bruges], but it’s there, and by the end, even though we’ve seen all the violence and it’s kind of shocking in places – hopefully not gratuitous – but by the end I think there’s a morality there that might not be your exact morality, but you can kind of see it, and hopefully it elevates the things to an almost decent place.”
It definitely does, and by the end there is a real sense of peace and sticking to your own moral code – whether you're a psychopath or someone who just wants to finish a screenplay.