Why the long face, Ryan Gosling? I get that you want to distance yourself from the cheeseball stigma of “The Notebook,” but enough already. You brooded through “Drive” and glowered through (half of) “The Place Beyond the Pines,” and now this. You’re so handsome when you smile, RGos. Why won’t you smile?
There’s almost zero levity to be had in “Only God Forgives,” from “Drive” director Nicolas Winding Refn, in which Gosling reprises his man-of-few-words persona. This time around, he’s a Bangkok-dwelling American named Julian who co-owns a boxing club with his brother Billy (Tom Burke) and spends his off-hours watching his favorite prostitute (Yayaying Rhatha Phongam) writhe around for him.
The gym is a front for the brothers’ drug-smuggling operation, but that’s not Billy’s undoing: It’s his murder of a teenage girl that gets him beaten to death by her vengeful dad, tipped off by a local retired police chief (Vithaya Pansringarm).
Perhaps beaten is the wrong word. Pulverized?
By the time the credits roll, this will seem like small potatoes. You’ll have also witnessed various men sliced open vertically; impaled in the arms, legs, eyes and ear; massacred with machine guns; having limbs amputated; being singed with boiling oil; and sticking a hand quasi-erotically into the sliced-open abdomen of a dead woman. It’s a level of gore even George R.R. Martin might gently suggest toning down.
Alerted to Billy’s death, mom Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas, styled as Donatella Versace if she were a “Real Housewife”) comes blazing into Bangkok, her equally long nails, ponytail and cigarette trembling with villainous indignation. “My first son is dead!” she moans, Greek-tragically, though she’ll still deign to caress the biceps of her second son — and remark on his being less well-endowed than his big brother.
Thomas’ dragon-lady act is the best thing going in “Only God Forgives”; she’s a welcome reprieve from the wearying onslaught of violence-as-high-art that’s defined Refn’s career. What makes it high art? The fact that it happens really slowly, I think, or that it’s interspersed with patience-testing camera pans of wallpaper.
Refn has said this film is about “a man who wants to fight God,” but as far as I can see, it’s about a man who can’t get it up (and raised by a mother like that, no wonder). Julian’s antagonist is the retired cop, a single-minded righteous-killing machine who’s dead set on weeding out corruption around town, ninja style. Now here’s a guy who knows what to do with his sword.
The cop is also a big hit on the karaoke circuit, where he tends to pop up after one of his stints meting out justice. It’s a surreal motif that suggests early David Lynch, minus the funny. And the funny was what elevated Lynch’s creations from being mere cruelty fetishism.
The innovation of Refn’s latest is mostly just in the way it manages to merge gory and boring. At least it’s created a new movie adjective for me: goring.