It’s been six years since filmmaker Guy Ritchie teamed up with Madonna to make the apocalyptically bad Swept Away. In the interim, the couple has been quietly licking their wounds: Ritchie has directed a pair of nondescript actioners while his soon-to-be ex made a pointless appearance in Die Another Day. Aside from that, zippo.
Now, as fate would have it, each is releasing a directorial effort within weeks of their divorce filing. And what would appear to be an even battle of hack vs. hack is actually a slight victory for the neophyte director – with the old pro emerging as a true chump.
The bad news for Ritchie is that his offering, RocknRolla is even worse than its title, and this time, he can’t pin the blame on his wife.
Like all of Ritchie’s other pictures, RocknRolla seems to have been cobbled together after a cocaine-fueled Tarantino festival. Ritchie is again trying to one-up his idol by multiplying the plots of Pulp Fiction by a factor of four, while replicating Tarantino’s hothouse dialogue and sitcom gangsters.
The dozen-or-so stories in RocknRolla are impossible to summarize; they zigzag and cross-pollinate until the picture collapses into indecipherable goo. Narcotics are smoked, threats are made and alliances are broken, and each narrative ends with underworld toughs pummeling each other while implying (and sometimes admitting) their homosexual tendencies.
After a while, the movie seems less mindless thriller than personal psychodrama, with Ritchie openly questioning his own sexual orientation by dramatizing his characters’ gay panic. And if that isn’t grounds for divorce, I don’t know what is.
While Ritchie was frittering away what was left of his credibility, Madonna was working on her unpleasant, though competent, debut feature Filth and Wisdom.
A collaboration with novice writer Dan Cadan (who worked in various capacities on Ritchie’s last few films), Wisdom is Madonna’s wobbly collection of life lessons earned throughout a lifetime of self-promoting sexuality.
A.K. (Eugene Hutz) is the central character, a Ukrainian rocker who has surrounded himself with a coterie of amoral drifters. A.K. is meant to be our guide through a shocking, deviant world – his friends’ lives depend on drugs and/or degradation – but it’s impossible to take him seriously; he exists mainly to deliver fortune cookie aphorisms while Madonna cranks out the sleaze.
A former icon of sexual liberation, Madonna is showing her age, badly, and the movie reveals a curiously Puritanical heart. Her leering camera judges, and sometimes punishes, her characters for their various kinks. In her newly bourgeoisie world, stripteases and sadomasochism are filth; wisdom is marriage and financial self-reliance.
Despite all of that, Wisdom has a substantial leg up on RocknRolla: It at least aims for coherence, and sometimes even hits the mark. It’s a movie that would probably earn a C in film school. At this point, that’s a grade that Ritchie would probably kill for.
Ratings:
RocknRolla: *
Filth and Wisdom: **
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