June 13, 2001 | During the opening minutes of the smashing new movie called Sexy Beast, we see a beefy, middle-aged bloke – quite obviously, not the title character – sunning his dangerously pasty carcass on a chaise lounge at the edge of a sumptuous swimming pool. Gradually, almost stealthily, we’re made aware that the sunbather, nicknamed Gal (Ray Winstone), used to be a mid-level gangster back in London. But that was before he served hard time, saw the light and retreated to Spain’s Costa del Sol. These days, Gal muses in a thickly accented voiceover, he is contentedly retired, savoring days and nights of blissful indolence with Deedee (Amanda Redman), his voluptuous ex-porn star wife. Life is good.
But then a boulder loosens itself from the cliff above Gal’s seaside villa. The immense rock slowly rolls downhill, then hits a bump that sets it aloft. It races just over Gal’s head, missing it by mere inches, and splashes down in the swimming pool.
Although he’s not a man often given to philosophizing, Gal nonetheless recognizes the near-tragedy as a portent. So does the audience. It’s a sign, a palpable sign, that no matter how happy you are, how many plans you’ve made for your future and how completely you’ve cut off your past, there’s always the chance that fate or nature or something else, something totally unexpected, will come crashing down upon you.
And then, as if to reinforce that impression, along comes Don Logan (Ben Kingsley).
We first hear the name when it’s whispered, with equal measures of awe and trembling, while Gal and Deedee are dining with another couple of Brit expatriates, Aitch (Cavan Kendall) and Jackie (Julianne White). A few beats later, we actually see the fellow in question, and we instantly understand what all the awe and trembling were about. Imagine a clenched fist with a savage goatee and a glare that could demolish reinforced concrete. Imagine a bald, balefully tanned Satan who moonlights as a bantamweight boxer on the senior circuit. Imagine the last man on Earth whom you’d want to see on your doorstep.
Now imagine Ben Kingsley — yes, that Ben Kingsley – in the role. But don’t dare laugh, because he’ll wipe the smile right off your face and shove the laughter back down your throat.
Don is the go-to guy for a decadent Brit mobster, Teddy Bass (Ian McShane), and if there were a formal job description posted for this kind of employment, his list of “other duties as assigned” would include messenger, recruiter, enforcer and, when required, leg-breaker. He is a thoroughly nasty piece of work, and the nastiest thing about him is his ability to wield full-throated, in-your-face intimidation like a blunt instrument. (When he arrives at Gal’s place, he makes an innocuous observation – “So this is a Spanish villa, is it?” – sound like a contemptuous taunt.) Don doesn’t take no for an answer, he doesn’t even acknowledge it as an option. And he knows where all the bodies are buried, most likely because he himself dumped the dirt on most of them.
Don travels to Spain to enlist Gal for a major heist planned by Teddy and his crew. Gal argues, persuasively, that he’s too out of shape for such an enterprise, but that doesn’t matter to Don. Gal insists – angrily, plaintively and every other way he can think of – that he’s happily retired and doesn’t want to return to crime, but that doesn’t matter to Don, either. “I won’t let you be happy!” Don snarls with the single-minded fury of a hungry Rottweiler. “Why should I?”
Directed with a dazzling mix of flamboyant visual flair and intensely intimate brutality by music video veteran Jonathan Glazer, Sexy Beast is a furiously hard-boiled and foul-mouthed crime drama that’s also a darkly and shockingly funny comedy of bad manners. This is Glazer’s first feature, but his work is smooth and self-assured, almost arrogantly so, and he obviously has learned his lessons well by studying cult-fave Brit gangster movies of the 1960s, ’70s and early ’80s.
The casting of James Fox in a supporting role and the sporadic fracturing of continuity – in the middle of a fateful confrontation, the movie simply leaps ahead in time, filling in the gaps later with teasing flashback snippets – evokes memories of Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s Performance. The purposeful violence of Brit mobsters at cross-purposes recalls Villain (which, not incidentally, also co-starred Ian McShane), The Long Good Friday and the original 1971 Get Carter.
And the climactic heist –- which involves an underwater route to a bank vault -– is neatly pilfered from an obscure 1980 thriller, Loophole, that isn’t listed prominently on the resumes of its two stars, Albert Finney and Martin Sheen.
But there are big differences between Glazer’s own film and the golden oldies he samples. For one thing, there’s the script by Louis Mellis and David Scinto, which is cannily constructed as a cross between caper flick and drawing-room comedy, and fueled by staccato bursts of rapid-fire dialogue that suggest a collaboration between Harold Pinter and Quentin Tarantino.
For another thing -– well, this should count as several other things, really -– there is big, bad Ben Kingsley, tough enough to banish any thought of the noble nice guys he played in Gandhi and Schindler’s List. The beauty part of his performance – and, yes, the scary thing about it – is how comfortable Kingsley appears inside this hard case’s burnished skin, how dead-on, irrefutably right he seems in the part. He’s obviously having the time of his life, and he doesn’t care if you know it.
Strictly speaking, he isn’t the star of the piece: Ray Winstone (who’s terrific, no doubt about it) actually receives top billing, and is on camera much longer than Kingsley. But Kingsley is the one who seizes the movie in his teeth, shakes it vigorously and viciously, and never lets go. Even during the long stretches when he’s off camera, his presence is felt. So it’s only fitting that, at the very end, when Don Logan appears to be permanently out of the picture, he pops up one last time to show that you just can’t keep a bad man down.