“The Guard” (2011)

It’s not often that you get to the end of the International Film Festival and still have fond memories of its opening night.  A regretful irony of the event is usually that the movie selected to kick things off is mainstream to the point of being no good at.  In an effort to appeal to the widest possible audience the festival often betrays itself.

In 2011 this did not happen.  “The Guard”, an idiosyncractic offering from Ireland, was laugh out loud funny.  It’s now returned for a run at the Lido, offering the discerning another chance to savour a buddy cop film with a difference.

Brendon Gleeson makes for a shambolic and earthy leading man.  His Gerry Boyle is a fiftysomething Irish copper with his own sense justice.  A frequent and liberal user of illicit substances and unashamed whore monger, Boyle runs his little isolated coastal patch of the emerald isle with a healthy sense of indifference to the letter of the law.  In this he’s a least less consistent than many of corrupt colleagues.  Boyle isn’t on the graft but he certainly knows who number one is.

A local murder upsets the tranquil balance of his existence.  Boyle’s saddled with new, green-around-the-gills subordinate, forced to liaise with Head Office, and has to assist a visiting FBI agent who is hot on the trail of some international drug dealers.  Said agent - a fiesty, by-the-book crusader played by the excellent Don Cheadle - has a law enforcement style somewhat at odds with local practice.

While the ethnicity of Cheadle and basic scenario suggest a Gaellic, blackly comedic variation on “In the Heat of the Night”, “The Guard”’s  loose structure, at times languid pacing and quirky subplots deliver something a lot more satisfying.  Scenes between Boyle and his dying mother have an unexpected poignancy to them, bringing out  Gleeson’s softer side.  Another beautiful sequence in which he picks up two prostitutes from a train station lyrically celebrates sin in ways reminiscent of that most under appreciated of contemporary classics, Spielberg’s “Catch Me if You Can”.

Perhaps those who like their endings like their characters - black and white - might not warm to “The Guard”’s moral ambiguity.  There has been criticism in some Irish quarters about how it perpetuates stereotypes.  I’d argue that what seems at first like cliche in plot and characterisation is overcome through superior acting and direction.  It’s the type of movie where even henchmen are real people, capable of generating laughs, and that it’s braver to acknowledge an IRA past with a joke than pretend that Troubles never happened.