GUY RITCHIE

DIRECTOR CREATES NEW FILMMAKING STYLE THAT DEFINES BRITISHNESS

by PETER THOMAS BUSCH

Cinema can be used to define culturalism as opposed to culture defining cinema.

British cinema has an ever ending list of historical topics for the heritage film genre, such as Chariots of Fire (1981). When Hollywood came to dominate theatre screens, though, not just in America but also in Britain and around the world, filmmakers had to redefine themselves to forestall the collective consciousness in London from dissolving into Americana.

Director Guy Ritchie considered his film heritage before creating a style that was simultaneously entertaining and career defining, while tapping into the prevailing national psyche.

Ritchie created an auteur style for the telling on film of distinctly urban stories about ordinary people struggling. When that well of anecdotes had been tapped, Ritchie moved into the world of the new aristocracy being handed down the old money, land estates with mansions and tapestries from their parents.

In Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) Ritchie begins telling a series of stories about street gangsters operating beneath the surface of London society. Not quite a franchise, the filmmaker nevertheless develops a formula for cinematic success.

The baseline is an ensemble of character actors cast as small time London criminals intersecting with violent gangsters. Jason Stratham and Vinnie Jones become recurring actors in Ritchie films as if the director continually taps into the same crime network for entertaining stories.

The characters often have independent stories about the struggle to survive. These smaller worlds of criminal activity inevitably collide with each other, often as secondary plots to the real gangsters who are also living in a world of their own, except the world is much larger and much more violent.

The petty criminal might still be compelled to earn an income dishonestly, but they lack the real evil of their competitors that results in graphic violence. The characters might be distinguished between sociopaths and psychopaths, but the difference purposely becomes slightly more obscure when Ritchie throws down a layer of dark humor over everything.

In Snatch (2000) independent narratives tell the stories of a hustle involving more and more players when a diamond heist entangles a band of Irish travelers living out of caravans. The diamond theft inevitably leads to a debt, and then betting on bare knuckle fighting to recover the losses.

In the end, the sociopaths may be as incompetent in crime as in life while the psychopaths simply obliterate everything if they begin to lose out.

There is the hustle, but there is also the hustle that goes wrong, resulting in money having to be recovered and/or a debt repaid.

Brad Pitt plays Mickey O’Neill, who has an uncanny ability to knock out much larger opponents with just one punch. Pitt plays just one character though in an ensemble cast of character actors as the pros and the amateurs try to out-hustle each other.

The stories often become riddled with cliches, such as the independent criminals stealing from the wrong gangster or having to pay back a debt to organized crime by arranging quick thefts that ultimately go wrong and get the amateur even further away from the amount needed to repay the debt.

The formula often involves capturing the audacity of ordinary people in and around acts of extraordinary violence.

Ritchie’s method has everyone detached from the world, but as the plans to get rich go sideways, everyone eventually gets to know each other, or at least is aware of their existence, for better or for worse.

In what is ultimately a closely defined criminal network, suspense is created by keeping individuals oblivious to how their criminal acts will eventually determine their unfortunate outcomes.

Ritchie does not glamorize criminal activity, but instead, the filmmaker uses humor and violence to show the criminal underworld as clumsy and evil, with individual characters being able to do what they do because they are empty inside.

The narrative is often an exercise in futility with no net monetary transactions other than a lot of collateral damage occurring along the way.

Ritchie inevitably ups his game by making films that depict London society accented with what becomes known as laddism.

Laddism depicts the negative influences of overbearing masculinity. The lads cannot even get along with themselves, so weird and unordinary many of the characters are eventually revealed to be, as if generated from the rhythm of street chaos.

Ritchie deconstructs the nuances as a form of social criticism. The gritty street culture develops out of the struggle of ordinary people to survive, who are without any other means to provide for themselves. But many of the players are empty inside, and bounce off of each other without any meaning.

Eventually the fractured crime narrative merges with laddism as the camera explores the off-the-grid exploits of the young aristocracy, who have to figure out what to do with their vast inheritance. The formula is similar to the fractured crime comedies, but the plots involve new characters who ought to know better.

In the Gentlemen (Series 2024) the inheritance of an estate passes to the second son, because the first son is a bit of a scoundrel. But the second son soon enough finds out that the first son needs his inheritance to pay off an accumulated debt.

Theo James and Daniell Ings play brothers who are closely bonded despite having opposite characters. James plays Eddie, who returns from the military to inherit his father’s estate, while Ings plays Freddy, the bumbling doppelganger constantly making mistakes and getting into deeper trouble.

Ritchie again tells the stories with dark humour and graphic violence, except that the new aristocracy have been preprogrammed as moral beings. Freddy gets in trouble largely out of stupidity and trusting the wrong people who are ultimately out to hustle him, while Eddie keeps apologizing for his involvement in the mess, eventhough his morality compels him to stick with his older brother, regardless of the outcome.

Again here, in the reimagined formula, the need to repay Freddy’s preexisting debt results in  lot of collateral damage and other more complicated debts created through deal making and brinkmanship.

Those that do, such as those inheriting old money floating among the aristocracy, are involved in the same activities as the London underworld, except on a larger scale, involving millions of dollars between historic mansions and the surrounding estate lands, instead of thousands of dollars in one London tenement or another tenement, on this or that street.

For Ritchie, that fragmented story of struggle among different social economic classes in Britain also needs a layer of aesthetics. The uniquely stylized post modernist approach deconstructs the story from a particular perspective, as part of a rolling commentary on society.

The post modernist camera operated by the auteur, for example, pans around the set as an omniscient narrator. Ritchie distances himself from the story in order to turn entertaining stories sideways. There exists that same compelling disbelief of comedies where the entertainment value becomes more compelling than the alleged truth of what is happening on the screen. Everyone accepts the magical charade as long as following the story leads to a good belly laugh.

But the director also dissects the actions.

The frame is often slowed down to retell the story, or in some cases, to foretell the story. This distancing between filmmaker and film creates an omniscient narrator distinctly in control of the telling – and everything is purposely just so.

Ritchie also uses a voice over to explain that the story has already happened and the director knows all parts of the story, even though the narrative is fractured. This omniscient storytelling leaves the befuddled viewer to keep following along in the belief that eventually all will be revealed.

In Sherlock Holmes (2009) the technique is replicated with the director behind the camera obviously manipulating the scenes, while the characters on screen estimate the outcomes of a deconstructed reality. Ritchie literally examines the story from frame to frame, while the title characters do their best to foretell the next sequence of scenes.

Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law costar as Sherlock Holmes and Dr John Watson in a watershed film that blends comedic criminality with aristocrats acting like a bunch of lads while navigating the chaos in a historical context. Rachel McAdams, Mark Strong and Eddie Marsan also star in another ensemble cast.

The scenes slow to a stop while the music and/or voice over continue in real time. This film aesthetic creates time to engage the audience in a post modern dialogue about society and other people.

Holmes and Watson investigate the story while Ritchie navigates the camera through the narrative his lead characters uncover for him, although incrementally, one clue at a time.

The graphic images continue to provoke a stimulus response while emotive responses are intensified by compressing time within real time. In the result, the viewer is entertained while the director distances himself from the sociopathic gangsters and the misfortune encountered by ordinary people.

In the end, the director’s story boards depict chaos as a reflection of the humanity struggling to survive in the underworld, but the highly stylized movie magic created by the director brings everything together along a legible narrative toward logical conclusions.

For example, the camera portrays the characters who do not fit in with society as irreverent, not just to each other, but toward any formal structure. The characters do not even respect the power within the criminal underworld other than the power to kill and to be killed pursuing the fanciful idea of becoming rich.

With Sherlock Holmes, even the investigators trying to make sense of it all have certain sociopathic tendencies, although their goals are genuinely moral. However, in the purely criminal enterprise films, the content is limited by the inauthenticity of the characters, as the lads irreverently exchange meaningless information while trying to out-hustle each other.

What you see though is a bit more than fun and games.

British Cinema: A Very Short Introduction, by Charles Barr, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2022

Britpop Cinema, by Matt Glasby, Bristol, Intellect, 2019