New Archive:
January 2001 Issue
Gangsters! Boxers! Diamond Dealers in Kippas!
Andrew Bender reviews Snatch
Move
over, Jane Austen. In his new movie Snatch, writer/director Guy
Ritchie has created an England that throbs with drums and electric guitars,
throws real punches, has car chases on every block, and knows how to carry
firearms with style.
Snatch is a Pulp Fiction for the new millennium, a multi-layered, multi-ethnic, multi-grossout bing-bang-boom heist comedy, with enough fast action and loud music to satisfy even post-MTV alpha males.
It starts, incongruously enough, with a bunch of Hassidim entering a diamond brokerage, one minute postulating that the notion of the virgin birth of Jesus was based on a misinterpretation of ancient Hebrew, and the next minute brandishing machine guns to steal a diamond the size of a matzah ball. The stone soon makes its way through those parts of London they don't show on the Travel Channel, from diamond district to pawn shop, from the underground boxing world to a trailer park inhabited by roving, spirited small-time crooks called Pikers, with their own dialect.
Snatch has one of those ridiculously intricate, interwoven plots that typically make me go "hunh?" But Ritchie (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) has accomplished a difficult trick, making a nonstop barrage of imagery add up to a story that's comprehensible, even if strong accents mean that some of the dialog is not.
What really makes the film, though, are the colorful characters armed
with quivers of quirks. Diamond merchant Doug the Head wears a kippa
and has a cell phone that rings to "Hava Nagila," and he isn't even Jewish.
Boris the Blade is a Russian mobster physiologically incapable of being
killed, while Brick Top is a boxing promoter who feeds fallen foes to
pigs. Tyrone's a hit man so big that he can't get out of his getaway car,
and gangster Franky Four Fingers hears "Viva Las Vegas" and sees roulette
wheels, booze, and neon whenever someone mentions gambling. Even the dogs
have personality.
This is not filmmaking of the pensive glance. It's chock-a-block with action--it is about thugs, after all--but Ritchie wisely injects humor at every turn, deflating the puffery and meanness that could have been. Witness the dog who swallows a squeaky toy, the shortest ever on-screen journey from New York to London (shown entirely in smash cuts), and a soundtrack including calypso, klezmer, and "Like a Virgin" (for the celebrity-impaired, Ritchie recently married Madonna).
The mostly English ensemble cast is strong to a man (there are virtually no women); the only actors with much name recognition stateside are Dennis Farina, as New York jeweler Cousin Avi, and Benicio del Toro, hilarious as Franky Four Fingers. My guess is that other English cast members will go on to big things in Hollywood.
Speaking of which, the cast also includes one Brad Pitt, outdoing himself as One Punch Mickey, the bare-knuckle Piker boxer. His performance is playful, gutsy, and fully alive, and I've never seen him have so much fun. He seems to relish making Mickey's inane speech patterns bob and weave like his boxing moves, yet he's also got heart when he needs it. It's his best role yet.
London was well served here too. Ritchie has created an England that's the opposite of, as Cousin Avi puts it, a "fish and chips, cup o' tea, bad food, worse weather, Mary F#@&ing Poppins" kind of place.
To which all I can say is "Cool, Brittania."
----------------
Snatch, rated R. Written and directed by Guy Ritchie. Starring: Benicio del Toro, Dennis Farina, Vinnie Jones, Brad Pitt, Rade Serbedzija, Jason Statham. Running time 104 minutes.
Los Angeles-based Andrew Bender reviews films for various JFL websites and writes about culture, travel, and food for publications including the Los Angeles Times, Travel & Leisure, and Fortune. This former production company executive and sometime screenwriter also reviews restaurants (and we're keeping his identity secret by not posting his photo).
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