Only God Forgives might be Ryan Gosling's very first bad performance. That's curious, because he plays a character not more than a few miles from his taciturn hero from Drive, which was one of his best performances. There, he was a slowly boiling pot of silent emotion. In Only God Forgives, which reunites him with director Nicolas Winding Refn, he's even more taciturn, but there appears to be nothing behind his blank stare. There are myriad shots of him looking deeply, and most of the movie is bathed in a deep red hue that makes his blue eyes glow like cat's eyes. He spends more time observing than any top-billed actor in any movie short of Mystery Science Theater 3000, I think.
Only God Forgives is the kind of turd that only an accomplished, supremely talented director could possibly have made. Refn is trying once again to make a classy arthouse genre picture like Drive, but he forgets what made that film a superior example. It was about an amoral person who gained a soul. Only God Forgives is about soulless people who remain soulless. While Drive was about characters struggling to do the right thing in situations that force them to do wrong, Only God Forgives is a purposely nihilistic exercise in pretentious film school claptrap.
Refn purposely uses the template of a western, transported to a barren Thai urban wasteland. Drug dealer Billy (Tom Burke) kills a prostitute. Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), a policeman who believes literally in an-eye-for-an-eye, commands the girl's father to kill Billy in retaliation, which he does. Julian (Gosling), Billy's brother, is commanded by his domineering mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) to take revenge on Chang. And so the vicious circle of revenge continues... [snore]
If Only God Forgives is not the most tedious film ever made, it's certainly the bloodiest tedious film ever made. Limbs are chopped off, guts are cut out, and one poor character is very graphically blinded, but it's difficult to care. Refn displays the violence unironically and without style, refusing to glorify such acts but also refusing to give them any sort of purpose.
The movie begins with a spark of life, as Burke plays the short-lived Billy as a dangerous firebrand, the type who walks into a brothel and says, "I want an underaged prostitute." He's such a vile character that when the movie kills him off, it loses all of its steam.
Ms. Scott Thomas tries to revive the proceedings, not by lending class to an otherwise hamfisted affair, but by playing her role so badly that she grabs our attention at every turn. She saunters in at the midpoint, verbally abuses several characters, delivers a vulgar and poorly written speech about the size of her sons' penises, and generally causes a mean ruckus. It is one of the most flamboyantly awful performances I've ever seen, worthy of comparison with, say, Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct (both 1 and 2), or Famke Janssen on "Hemlock Grove." Her character is a plot contrivance, and reeks of Refn's desperation, but well, she's not boring.
Gosling's character, meant to be the conscience of the film, just isn't there. I think he's meant to be portrayed as a morally conflicted soul, but his constant silent staring provides little insight. Refn has given Gosling nothing to hold on to; Julian is a cipher, and feels like a minor character in his own story. I can understand why Gosling wanted to work with Refn again after Drive. If the two ever work together again, I will be surprised.
* 1/2 out of ****
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