In Bruges, On Your Mind
The below essay was written as part of my application to the Telluride Film Festival Student Symposium, which I attended in 2021 with 49 other students from around the world. The prompt was simple - pick a movie that means something to you.
Although Martin McDonagh was born and raised in London, he has Irish parents and is generally considered an Irish playwright and director, and In Bruges, his first feature, has this fact written all over it. From the moment Ray (Colin Farrell) begins the film with a voice over in his thick Dublin accent, oddly juxtaposed against a montage of medieval Belgian architecture, the film becomes a particularly Irish exploration of religion, history and the reasons we choose to live and die. And it is through the particulars of the very Irish attitudes of the two protagonists that the movie becomes so relatable, and strangely profound, despite its packaging as a gangster movie.
While the city of Bruges acts as a sort of literal, gothic purgatory in which two hitmen, Ray and Ken (Brendan Gleeson), await the judgement of their boss, as important as the “fairy tale” setting of Bruges are the places not seen, particularly Ireland. Ray establishes his Irishness early in the movie when he reminds Ken that he “grew up in Dublin” and is consequently not impressed by Bruges and does not want to go sightseeing. This mundane moment early on highlights a fundamental theme of the movie: the extent to which where we are from impacts who we are. This idea is returned to over and over again, as characters are repeatedly stereotyped by their nationality. Although the dialogue can lean into the brazen and offensive in these moments – at times in excess – it is always followed up by moments of understated seriousness that makes them impossible to dismiss. In each case McDonagh subverts the initial impression of each person (two “Americans” are actually Canadian; the Belgian girl who robs people is actually a good person) to interrogate the plausibility of these stereotypes.
This becomes important for our protagonists because it begs the question whether their job as contract killers, and their Irishness, are their primary identifiers, and whether Ray’s accidental murder of a child while on a job defines him. Grappling with his mistake while looking at a painting, Ray asks Ken whether he believes in “all that stuff” – Catholicism, that is. Ken says he was brought up to, and in fact what the characters did as children is brought up repeatedly. The very setting of Bruges is chosen because the hitmen’s boss, Harry (Ralph Fiennes), took a holiday there as a kid. And Harry repeats over and over that the “boy” – Ray is still a kid – must die for his mistake. Nonetheless, in the final act Ken decides that Ray’s one mistake should not define him, and sets him free, leading to a bloody final showdown. In juxtaposing all of these moral codes, McDonagh asks the audience by what code will we choose to live by, and how seriously will we follow it. In the end it advocates for none of the codes offered up, leaving the audience only with Ray’s final line, “I really really hoped I wouldn’t die.” All McDonagh can say for sure, is to keep on living.
In one of Ray’s crusades against Ken’s sightseeing, he says that he doesn’t like history because “it’s just a bunch of stuff that already happened.” It is an ironic line from a man trying to outrun his past, but it is illustrative of the movie’s interest in how what has happened affects our future. It is going too far to argue that McDonagh is making some commentary on Irish history’s suffocating role on modernization in its society, but I would argue that this movie is important because of its peculiar Irishness. The wisecracks and the religion, the desire to leave but the pull of home, these are all foundations of what it is to be Irish. Even the rapid back and forth between characters flows in a peculiarly Irish way, and it is out of the delivery’s specificity that the movie becomes universal. Ray can’t change where he’s from or the mistakes he’s made, but McDonagh suggests that if you can take responsibility, life is there to be lived. It is as applicable in our personal lives as it is in the bloody history of the nation-state, and in the end, In Bruges asks us to give the future a chance.