Martin McDonagh’s latest acerbic comedy of biting remarks, The Banshees of Inisherin, has given critics, audiences, and screenwriters the opportunity to reflect on his unique, darkly comic, gift of gab, transposed onto his frustrated characters, and best put to use in comedies. It plants Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson on an island in his native Ireland, but McDonagh has previously used these two as fish-out-water Celtics by supplanting their back-and-forth yammering into Belgium. In Bruges, specifically.
Evan Puschak, better known by his online pseudonym The NerdWriter, took In Bruges as a case study in a 2015 video essay, which interrogates the writer’s covert thematic concerns. It’s a gothic, old-world setting that’s so important to McDonagh’s 2008 best original screenplay nominee, that the very first line of his script is dedicated to describing it. The word McDonagh falls on is ‘otherworldly’. That presence is imposed onto the main characters of In Bruges, two Irish hitmen locked into this morality tale. One
(Gleeson) seasoned and impatient with his partner, the other (Farrell) green and remorseful over his part in the accidental murder of a child on his first job. They’re in Bruges to await judgement for the rookie’s indiscretion. Per Puschak, Bruges functions as a metaphor for purgatory. It’s a stage where McDonagh can examine morality in a “post-modern” world, as it grows farther from traditional measures of right and wrong. After all, what’s the measure of immorality in the world of hitmen? Honour among thieves? Not likely.
McDonagh prefers to portray those characters with a hard-and-fast propensity for moral grandstanding as being especially cruel, and prideful. In this way, characters like Ralph Fiennes as ‘the boss’ are made to parallel the rigid, disciplinary morality of the Catholic church, an omnipresent fixture in the landscape of Bruges, which is as Puschak notes, one of the world’s best preserved cities. Even outside of these historical architectural holdovers, McDonagh has his leads visit an art gallery and peruse paintings of deathly judgement; Death and the Miser, The Judgement of Cambyses, and Hieronymus Bosch’s The Last Judgement. NerdWriter posits that the lessons of divine judgement and Christian sin learned in youth, though they may be cast off in time, never quite leave their hosts, like “being stuck in a city where the moments of history tower all around you”. On some level, there’s no escaping guilt. Following their museum visit, Farrell’s character sobs and explains;
“I know I didn’t mean to. But because of the choices I made, and the course that I put into action, a little boy isn’t here any more. And he’ll never be here again… Y’know, I mean here in the world. Not here in Belgium.”
Puschak then elaborates on the final two lines at length to illuminate the nature of morality in the modern world: it is discursive. Of and by McDonagh’s greatest asset as a writer: language. The video contains spoilers, but is well worth a watch, once you’ve seen In Bruges, which is well worth several watches.