(UK, 93 min.)
Written and directed by Richard Shepard
Starring: Jude Law, Richard E. Grant, Demian Bichir, Kerry
Condon, Emilia Clarke.
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| Jude Law (left) and Richard E. Grant (right) in Dom Hemingway |
Now here’s the Jude Law who fucked the nanny! The usually
dapper Brit blows the lid off his suave screen persona with a giant F-bomb and
the result is fucking brilliant. Law immerses himself deeply within the
grotesque, yet charming, and profanity-spewing thug Dom Hemingway. Dom
Hemingway is a coarse and stylish boor with a sinful swagger. He’s Jude Law like
you’ve never seen him before on film: the bad boy, the debauched debonair, the
poetic poondog. Dom Hemingway offers
Law’s best performance in over a decade.
It’s a true makeover of a turn. Law packs on the pounds with a bit of muscle, a bit more flab, and a lot more beer belly. He accentuates the character’s oily roughness with a scruffy beard and an exaggerated shave of his receding hairline, and he fills Dom’s stylish suits with an intense arrogance.
Law teases the audience with a scintillating preview of the
full gonzo performance they can expect when Dom
Hemingway opens with the actor delivering a bravura dedication to Dom’s
sturdy cock while a penitentiary nurse fellates him behind bars. The speech,
which has the syntax and seediness of pulp fiction poetry, is an uproarious
introduction to the Dom. Dom pumps up his pecker with Frank T.J. Mackey-ish
flair and he says the C-word just as often. He also says the other C-word, the
F-word, and “piss” and “shit” and all that. There’s a rough poetry to the
crackling wordplay of Dom Hemingway,
especially since Dom isn’t one to watch his fucking language.
He’s a mass of contradictions, Dom, as evidenced by him
blowing his own load in the opening scene. He’s eloquent, yet crass; suave, yet
sketchy; charismatic, yet repulsive. It’s a testament to Law’s skill that he
makes such a repugnant man such a likable rascal. There’s just the right hint
of affectation to the way Dom sprouts obscenities that makes his coarseness
seems classy. Dom is the Wolf of Wall Street among common English crooks.
Dom, like Jordan Belfort, is a full-rager hedonist as he
works outside the law to line his pockets and as he dips in to all sorts of
sordid behaviour between gigs. Dom
Hemingway rivals Wolf in the
drugs, jugs, and thugs department (if one keeps in mind that Dom is roughly half the length of The Wolf of Wall Street), but Dom’s
taste for the bad stuff doesn’t seem quite as objectionable as Belfort’s does.
Dom, unlike Jordan, has an ethical code. After all, he finishes a twelve-year
prison sentence shortly after the film begins and the ensuing events reveal
that he could have easily shaved a few years off his stint had he snitched his
boss, Mr. Fontaine (Demian Bichir). Dom’s dozen years of confinement also give
him a plunging sense of loss, as the years behind bars robbed of the chance to
raise his daughter (played in her adult years by a good, if miscast, Emilia
Clarke). There’s something humane, even relatable, about Dom as he goes around
punching the shit out of people to redeem all the time and money he lost.
Dom Hemingway
challenges the viewer not to like its piggish gangster at every turn. Dom’s
first move when he gets out of the slammer is to track down and pulverize the
man who became his daughter’s stepfather. However, as with Dom's bj soliloquy, Dom Hemingway makes it hard to look away
from this obnoxious man. Writer/director Richard Shepard (The Matador) holds on Dom in a very tight shot that (mostly)
obscures the victim from the frame as Dom transforms the guy’s face into a
bloody pulp. There’s so much anger, fierceness, and hunger in Law’s performance
that the violence almost feels operatic, like an aria of dirty punches letting
off steam for a man who lost twelve years of his life and needs a place to
vent. Shepard undercuts the violence, though, by normalizing Dom’s aggression
with a spot-on bit of British humor as Dom trades niceties and friendly chitchat
with the eyewitnesses standing by in the station.
The humour Dom
Hemingway consistently balances the grandiose R-ratedness of the violence
and Dom’s vernacular. Shepard brings Dom
Hemingway into a fine middle ground of Guy Ritchie-ish British gangster
pics. The film is just as stylish as it is funny, but the characteristic
Englishness of the film—the ever-present attention to manners, formality, and
diction—both explodes and offsets the coarseness of the gangster elements. Take,
for example, Dom’s partner-in-crime Dickie (a fun Richard E. Grant) who is
forever by Dom’s side sporting a fake hand and a wardrobe of flamboyant ponce. (The
costumes by Julian Day are a highlight.) Dickie is the straight man to Don’s unhinged
madness and Grant’s reaction shot is often just as funny as the sauce spewing
from Law’s mouth.
It’s unfortunate, then, that Dom Hemingway doesn’t work as well overall as its performances do.
The strange chapter structure of the film is a bit of a mess, as Dom Hemingway spends a good third of the
film building some tension as Dom and Dickie make a trip to Mr. Fontaine’s to
claim what Dom feels he is owed. Shepard, however, gives the film an unexpected
turn in a hilarious car accident, which is the film’s most stylish centrepiece,
before bringing the film to a weird mid-section that sees Dom (and Dom) go in several directions. He wants
to enter the safe-cracking business and/or go straight and reunite with his
daughter. The safe-cracking story offers a few good jokes about a dead cat
named Banane and introduces a tense rivalry with a young gangster (Jumayne
Hunter). The daughter storyline, however, feels forced, especially since the
age difference between Law and Clarke makes it a bit hard to believe that the
Law is both her father and a grandfather to her son. Both stories give Law full
room to do his thing, though, so Dom
Hemingway works best as a riotous performance piece. Dom Hemingway is Law’s show and he owns every uproarious frame of it.
Rating: ★★★½ (out of ★★★★★)
Dom Hemingway is currently playing in Toronto at Cineplex Yonge and
Dundas.
It opens in Ottawa on
April 25.
Update: It opens at The Mayfair June 6.
Update: It opens at The Mayfair June 6.
