The Gentlemen opens with a performance. Mickey Pearson (Matthew McConaughey), in impeccable English tailoring, places a quintessentially English order of a pint and a pickled egg at a pub. He’s the very picture of the Englishman at leisure, though when he speaks, the illusion is interrupted — his accent is American. He’s in the world of Savile Row and Victorian pubs, but not of it. With this short opening, writer-director Guy Ritchie establishes a certain visual language of Englishness and raises questions about it. But before they can be answered, yet another subversion of expectations flashes across the screen, and an intro sequence begins, set to Paul Jones’s 1966 song, “Free Me.”
The color green recurs through the sequence, at one point forming a cannabis leaf, letting the viewer know just which illegal business this film is about. This, too, seems to be a mark of something new, distinct from the gamblers, burglars, and hit men of earlier Ritchie ventures.
The intro is followed by another show of contrasts. The owner of an expensively outfitted kitchen discovers an intruder who has just made himself comfortable. The surroundings are decidedly upper-middle class, but the accents are clearly working-class. Like McConaughey in the pub, the combination is not impossible, but it does raise questions. Namely, “Who are these people, and how did they get here?”
The intruder turns out to be Fletcher (Hugh Grant), a shady private investigator hired by Fleet Street’s most lurid tabloids to dig up dirt wherever it can be found. His most recent assignment is Pearson. With plenty of dirt on his target, who has carefully kept his criminality out of the public eye, Fletcher realizes that this information could be very lucrative if presented to Pearson’s team rather than the papers. This is what brings him to the expensively appointed home, which belongs to Pearson’s right-hand man, Raymond, played by Charlie Hunnam. He’s even brought along a screenplay version of his research.
Ritchie uses the narrative-within-a-narrative setup to play with the audience’s expectations. Fletcher, in his screenwriter act, decides to take an origin film approach. He begins with Pearson’s youth in an American trailer park and his escape by means of a scholarship to Oxford, where he befriends English blue bloods. Although he never finishes his degree, these connections become the foundation of his future business strategy. By the time the film takes place, Pearson has grown his burgeoning cannabis business to Fortune 500-size, right as legalization looms in much of the world. The gaps in Fletcher’s knowledge of Pearson’s operation are more important than he realizes. Even so, it’s clear from the outset that the sheer scope of Pearson’s business dwarfs that of the ventures in most crime films, particularly Ritchie’s own earlier efforts. For a criminal enterprise this big, investment bankers are just as prominent as enforcers.
The character-as-performer is a familiar motif to fans of Ritchie’s English gangster pictures. The writer-director is clearly enchanted by Britain’s cultures and subcultures, from martial artists to foreign oligarchs, working-class drug kingpins, gypsies, and, in this latest film, the landed gentry. His films feature ensemble casts, allowing Ritchie to juxtapose these disparate groups on-screen and create entertainment from the resulting contrasts. His characters share this fascination with cultural difference and even act on it. Ritchie’s 2000 cult classic heist film, Snatch, features Doug the Head, a jewel fence who, in the words of the film’s narrator, “pretends he’s Jewish, wishes he was Jewish, even tells his family they’re Jewish, but he’s about as Jewish as he is a f—ing monkey” — all in order to hide his business in London’s diamond district. Doug peppers his dialogue with Yiddish and even has a “Hava Nagila” ringtone. His act is over-the-top, but then again, so is just about everybody in the film.
Snatch was still very much a film of the moment when I was a student in Britain a decade ago. Despite the film’s Hollywood cast, it was unmistakably British in its style and cultural context. It took familiar surroundings and heightened them to highlight absurdities that usually pass unnoticed. The settings felt lived-in, something that holds true in The Gentlemen as well, despite its grander scale. Both films feature boxing gyms and the world of combat sports, something with which Ritchie, a lifelong martial artist, is intimately familiar. (Ritchie and I actually attended the same judo club in London, the Budokwai in Chelsea, though I can claim no acquaintance with him.) The hand-to-hand combat in the film is incredibly well-done, and among The Gentlemen’s colorful characters is an Irish boxing trainer known simply as “Coach,” played by Colin Farrell. He’s charming and held in awe by everybody in the neighborhood, an archetype that feels true to life.
Despite its incredibly colorful and imaginative expletives and the fact that, as a gangster film, it features some dark content and themes, The Gentlemen eschews the gratuitous, exploitative nudity and violence that seem to be staples of prestige entertainment these days, even on the BBC.
The Gentlemen is a welcome return to the genre of the British gangster film, a genre which Ritchie, in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, has shaped more than any other contemporary filmmaker. The sheer variety of modern British culture means that Ritchie can make films with a recognizably British sensibility that nonetheless contain a dazzling diversity, which not only contributes to Ritchie’s own style but also allows him to explore new plots. Like Fletcher, The Gentlemen takes it as given that the world’s a stage. It’s the rare comedy film that will not only make you laugh but will leave you guessing, attempting to put together pieces as the narrative unfolds.
