Martin McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths opens with a screenwriter who has a title and nothing else. Marty Faranan, played by Colin Farrell, is an alcoholic stuck on a script called Seven Psychopaths. He has the name. He does not have the seven psychopaths. That is the joke the film builds on, and for a while it works.
Trailer, via CBS Films.
Colin Farrell and the Screenplay That Won’t Write Itself
The film is a 2012 satirical crime comedy-drama, directed, written and co-produced by McDonagh. It runs 110 minutes. It is a co-production between the United Kingdom and the United States, and it marks the second collaboration among McDonagh, Farrell and Željko Ivanek, following In Bruges in 2008. That earlier film is the shadow this one stands in, and it never quite steps out of it.
Marty’s best friend is Billy Bickle, played by Sam Rockwell. Billy is a struggling actor who makes a living kidnapping dogs and collecting the reward for their safe return. His partner in the scheme is Hans Kieslowski, played by Christopher Walken, a religious man whose wife Myra has cancer. Billy wants to write with Marty, but he is too embarrassed to ask him straight out. So he feeds him material instead.
Billy shows Marty a newspaper story about the Jack of Diamonds Killer, who leaves playing cards on his mafia victims. Marty agrees to use him as one of the seven. Billy also tells him a story about the Quaker, who stalked his daughter’s killer for decades to drive the man to suicide. Marty is so drunk he thinks the idea was his own. Billy is left frustrated, and the film is at its best in that gap between what Billy gives and what Marty takes.
Sam Rockwell Steals What He Can
Rockwell is the engine here. Billy is the one who puts an ad in the paper inviting psychopaths to come share their stories with Marty. That ad is the film’s best structural idea, because it turns the screenplay into a magnet for strangers.
One of them is Zachariah Rigby, played by Tom Waits. He tells Marty and Billy about being half of a serial killer duo with Maggie, his now-ex-lover. Together they killed other serial killers. The film names them: the Texarkana Moonlight Murderer, the Cleveland Torso Murderer and the Zodiac Killer. Zachariah asks Marty to put his phone number in the credits, hoping Maggie will see the movie and come find him. Marty agrees.
That is a good scene, and Waits is good in it. But it also shows the film’s habit of introducing a strong idea and then walking away from it. Zachariah’s request is the most emotionally direct thing in the movie. It lands, and then the plot moves on.
Woody Harrelson’s Dog and the Gangster Problem
The plot proper arrives through Bonny, a Shih Tzu. Billy is sleeping with Angela, played by Olga Kurylenko, who is the girlfriend of gangster Charlie Costello, played by Woody Harrelson. Billy and Hans steal Bonny, Charlie’s beloved dog. Charlie’s men, led by Paolo, played by Željko Ivanek, track Hans to his hideout and threaten to kill him and Marty.
That is where the tagline comes from. It reads: “They won’t take any shih tzu.”
It is a pun, and the film knows it is a pun, and that is roughly the register of the whole thing. Seven Psychopaths wants to be a crime comedy about people who write crime, and it wants to be a crime comedy about people who commit crime, and it does not fully commit to either.
The cast is deep. Abbie Cornish plays Kaya. Michael Stuhlbarg plays Tommy. Kevin Corrigan plays Dennis. Michael Pitt plays Larry. Linda Bright Clay plays Myra Kieslowski. The film keeps handing good actors small parts, and most of them get one scene and are gone.
A Fourth Psychopath and a My Lai Revenge
Marty also comes up with a fourth psychopath on his own: a former Viet Cong fighter who travels to the United States dressed as a priest to take revenge on the soldiers responsible for killing his family in the My Lai massacre.
That is the film’s most serious thread, and it sits oddly beside the dog-napping and the puns. Seven Psychopaths keeps reaching for weight and then pulling back to a joke. Sometimes the pullback is funny. Sometimes it just looks like the film is afraid of its own material.
They won’t take any shih tzu.
The structure is loose in a way that reads as deliberate. Marty is writing a screenplay, and the film keeps showing us the pieces he is collecting, so the looseness is arguably the point. But a film that is about a writer who cannot finish his script still has to finish itself, and Seven Psychopaths does not land its ending with the same confidence it lands its scenes.
What the Film Gets Right and What It Wastes
The best thing here is the premise. A screenwriter who cannot invent psychopaths meets real ones, and the real ones are funnier and sadder than anything he could write. McDonagh has a real ear for men who talk too much and mean too little, and the film is full of that talk.
The worst thing is that the film never decides what it is. It is a satire of screenwriting, a crime comedy, and a meditation on violence, and it toggles between them rather than braiding them. In Bruges managed all three at once. Seven Psychopaths manages them in sequence.
There is also a real problem with the women. Angela and Kaya are mostly there to be girlfriends, and Myra is there to be sick. For a film this talky and this pleased with its own cleverness, the thinness of those parts is hard to ignore. The psychopaths get stories. The women get a diagnosis or a bed.
The film received positive reviews from critics. It had its world premiere on 7 September 2012 at the Toronto International Film Festival, opened in the United States and Canada on 12 October 2012, and reached the United Kingdom on 5 December 2012.
The Score and the Cast That Carries It
Seven Psychopaths is a good film with a great film somewhere inside it, and the gap between those two things is the whole story. Rockwell is the reason to watch. Walken gets the quietest and best-written part, and he does not waste it. Farrell is fine, but Marty is the least interesting person in his own movie, which may be the point and still costs the film.
The published critical score is 6.6 of 10. That feels right. It is not a failure, and it is not In Bruges. It is a film with a title, a cast and a premise that could carry more than McDonagh asks them to.
Key facts
- Release year: 2012
- Runtime: 110 minutes
- Genres: Comedy, Crime
- Director and writer: Martin McDonagh
- World premiere: 7 September 2012, Toronto International Film Festival
- US and Canada release: 12 October 2012
- UK release: 5 December 2012
- Score: 6.6 of 10
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