Rock, schlock and two smoking crack pipes
If you were to look up Guy Ritchie in the dictionary, the definition might read “one of those guys that Quentin Tarantino has to answer for.”
There’s no denying that the British director of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch owes a sizeable debt to Mr. Pulp Fiction. Ritchie was also the guy who shared bed space with Madonna (or “Madge” as she was known to the British tabloids) for a number of years, resulting in one loathsome filmic spectacle, Swept Away, starring the former Mrs. Ritchie.
Other than that horrific vanity blip, Ritchie has pretty much stayed true to form: British heist films with quirky characters, heavy on the visual flair (lots of cameras whipping around), light on meaning.
RocknRolla might not even play in theaters here (I caught it on a flight to the US) but it’s worth giving a spin on your home DVD player. For the sake of synopsis, Tom Wilkinson plays Lenny Cole, a tough London crime boss who keeps politicians and police in his back pocket in order to get rich off real estate scams. His latest pigeon is Uri (Karel Roden), a Russian who wants Lenny to pull the strings on a big soccer stadium project. In one of those plot twists that would make Alfred Hitchcock chuckle, Uri asks Lenny to hold on to his “lucky” painting until the deal is finalized. Naturally, the oil painting (which we never actually see; shades of the glowing yellow briefcase in Pulp Fiction) gets stolen. Most of the plot of RocknRolla revolves around getting it back.
(And incidentally, I can prove that the glowing yellow briefcase in Pulp Fiction can’t be full of gold bars because a single gold bar weighs about 24 pounds; even if the case was capable of holding only 10 bars, that would amount to 240 pounds. Try lifting that with one hand, as Jules and Vincent do so easily in the movie.)
We hear all of these plot details through Archy (Mark Strong), Lenny’s dapper right-hand man, who also fills us in on a crew of criminals called The Wild Bunch (a nod to Sam Peckinpah, the godfather of stylized screen violence). Among these is One-Two (Gerard Butler, last seen inflicting ultraviolence on a bunch of Persians in 300), who has been scammed by Lenny, and wouldn’t mind a little payback.
Enter Stella (Thandie Newton), Uri’s accountant who is also skimming her boss every chance she gets. She and One-Two figure out how to rip off Uri’s men and pay off Lenny at the same time; it’s like robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Meanwhile, in another corner of the ring, there’s Johnny Quid (Toby Kebbel), a disgruntled junkie rock star (and Lenny’s son) who has his own reasons for payback.
Some of the fun in watching Guy Ritchie movies is trying to figure out what the hell everybody is saying. Accents range from gutter-ball cockney to Scottish burr, scouse to posh upper-crust, Russian to Middle Eastern. Subtitles help, which is another reason to catch it on DVD. But it’s also part of Ritchie’s aesthetic, crafting tightly packaged crime capers with convoluted plots, thick jargon and in-jokes. The film — which hit number one in the UK box office — would probably not survive outside the rarified fishbowl of British cineastic attention, it’s that much of a mutant mutt.
Still, there’s some fun to be had. The jokes here are not as funny as in Snatch (Ritchie’s underrated second film; it featured Brad Pitt as an incomprehensible Scottish boxer among its colorful crew), but it has its share of pleasures. The dancing scene between One-Two and Stella at a cocktail party reminds us again of Pulp Fiction, but it also goes to show that sticking a dance sequence in a movie that is not a musical is often a good idea: it helps you root for the characters.
There’s a silly subplot about one of The Wild Bunch being gay, and how One-Two reacts to that news; it’s probably there to show that Ritchie, tough as he is, has nothing against homosexuals. There’s a philosophical quasi-Shakespearean reflection on a pack of cigarettes by Johnny Quid (about “all of life being contained in the four walls” of that package, rather like a coffin), and a lot of whipsaw dialogue that sounds like Tarantino run through a Scouse-A-Matic. There’s, as usual in Guy Ritchie movies, a nod to the USA with Quid’s two American managers (played by rapper Ludacris and Jeremy Piven) trying to keep their heads above concrete; and there’s a lot of scenes of squalor in London crack dens, grimy-looking corner pubs and posh art galleries. But when RocknRolla is smart, it focuses on Butler and Newton, who have a somewhat dangerous, sinewy relationship — they know they’re bad for each other, and it raises the interest level 100 percent.
When Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels appeared in 1998, its depiction of the London crime scene (as stylized and imaginary in Ritchie’s world as the cockney chimneysweep in Mary Poppins, and just as entertaining) seemed fresh, a vibrant response to the stylized crime world depicted by Tarantino in his first two films. But Tarantino since then has moved on to other subjects, to greater or lesser success. Ritchie meanwhile stubbornly hangs in there (barring the odd Madonna outing), risking becoming a parody of himself. Consistency sometimes is the hobgoblin of little minds.
So what is a “RocknRolla”? According to the movie’s opening lines, “It’s not about drums, drugs, and hospital drips. Oh, no. There’s more there than that, my friend. We all like a bit of the good life — some the money, some the drugs, others the sex game, the glamour, or the fame. But a RocknRolla, oh, he’s different. Why? Because a real RocknRolla wants the f*ing lot.”
Now that that’s cleared up, look out: for Ritchie hints that this is the first in a RocknRolla trilogy.
