PERRIER'S BOUNTY
Directed by Ian FitzGibbon
Produced by Alan Moloney, Stephen Woolley & Elizabeth Karlsen
Written by Mark O’Rowe
Released by IFC Films
Ireland/UK. 88 min. Not Rated
With Cillian Murphy, Jodie Whittaker, Jim Broadbent & Brendan Gleeson 
 

Perrier’s Bounty is a gangster film and a neo-noir that follows a path parallel to the one the Coen Brothers have carved out: crime stories that are equal parts humorous and harsh, and while heightened, have an emotional truth at the center. Their honest, feeling characters, affected by their environment and by the events around them, are absurd, weird, and broader than normal. Bounty writer Mark O’Rowe, an award-winning playwright and screenwriter, calls this tone “cartoon naturalism,” and it serves the film well by giving the audience something familiar—the standard gangster tropes—but delivering it wrapped in this odd aesthetic of stylized violence and poetic language.

Usually cartoonish unnaturalism—ridiculous violence and blank, nonresponsive characters—is the standard tone for these kind of films. Besides the beautiful language and the mellifluous line readings the actors give O’Rowe’s script, what really makes Bounty an interesting and worthwhile film is the fact that the characters have visceral reactions, something missing from most films and television. As most crime stories go, the plot is basic. Michael (Cillian Murphy) owes money to Dublin gangster Perrier (Brendan Gleeson). While his enforcers force the money out of Michael, his neighbor and friend Brenda (Jodie Whittaker), tries to stop the beating, and in doing so, shoots and kills one of the thugs. The two, with Michael’s estranged father (Jim Broadbent) in tow, then spend the film trying to evade Perrier’s men.

However, even with a typical narrative arc, which leads to the inexorable end one expects, a murder doesn’t just leave the murderer cold, but actually affects her. The victim’s friends do not simply grimace with movie machismo, but sulk and grieve and weep. Death is actually important, and therefore there are real stakes for the characters. It may be that in real life, like for Marlo on HBO’s The Wire, constant violence really does numb one to cruelty and brutality, but in fiction, numb characters are not compelling (with the exception of narratives where the point is for the character to overcome that numbness). Because of the honest emotional reactions, the cartoonish naturalism of Bounty ends up feeling more genuine than most dramas that purport to be in the realist mode. Andrew Beckerman
May 21, 2010