My original interpretation of the cinematographer/director's style was that it was placing the camera in the position of someone spying on the scene. I think the word "spy" though is wrong. It is the position of a voyeur.
The rough, hand-held style relied on a "foreground obstruction" aesthetic, too -- the motion of the camera and the intervening objects/people divided our attention between
the story as an objective thing, and made me at least feel as though we are seeing found footage from a documentary that is asking us to form an opinion from a mass of distracting elements.
Later, the obstructions, distractions, and extras change from being incidental to the story to becoming central to the story.
I got the sense right away that Jack Carter had come home to figure out what happened to his brother. He clearly didn't buy the drunk driving accident myth. And yet Jack shaving over his brother's coffin (showing no respect) and then his covering his brother's face (showing respect) communicates ambiguity about Jack's character. Is he an anti-hero taking on a moral vendetta, standing in for any of us who have seen or been victim to injustice? Or is he something else?
The sex started out as fun, and the women were beautiful. The way it was shot (the rocking chair scene, for example) used women in the foreground (or, Britt's legs in the foreground) to bring them forward in our awareness without them being the main plane of focus (either Jack on the phone or Britt's beautiful and erotic face). The rocking chair evoked the sounds and rhythms of sex but was absurdly quirky - a real point of humor, I think, but the beginning of how the director starts to blend sex, violence and humor.
We also see at the end of the rocking horse scene that the phone sex was not with Jack's monogamous partner, but that he was deeply in the erotic imagination of a woman attached to another man, and he was forcefully and unapologetically going to exploit his position there.
Even though what we learn about Jack in the rocking chair scene by itself happens to thousands or millions of people, in the context of the shaving scene and his penchant for paying people to do his bidding (at their risk) or to non-apologize apologize, we begin to see him as emotionally ill or detached. Not just an anti-hero.
Also early in the movie when there is a sex scene, before the audience gets a chance to let their heart slow down, bad guys show up to menace Jack - with the timing of the arrival of bad guys quickly converging precisely on the moment of intercourse.
Jack confidently wields a large gun and forces bad guys onto the street, following after them with no compunction, is funny ... but at the same time showing something menacing about Jack. A lack of shame becomes somehow foreshadowing for a deep lack of morality or empathy.
So now we get to the question: Is he a psychopath? The cruel language he uses with women, his roughness with them, particularly in the beginning, could perhaps at the time be understood as a grieving brother amidst prostitutes who were hiding information about his brother's death. But from 2015 -- and from the perspective of what we learn about Jack by the end of the movie -- he was a misogynist. Indeed, the disturbing scene where he gives his ex-brother's lover/regular prostitute an overdose shows him as calculating and without any empathy.
It's interesting to me that the core moment when Jack learns the motivation for everyone's bad before -- seeing Doreen in a porn film -- he goes from enjoying the film to being devastated. This is precisely what I was going through. I loved the beautiful women in the film and was willing to suspend my critique of their characters for some cinematic pleasure. But as the characters were having sex, the director was presenting them to us as a voyeur. The director's style was voyeuristic, and he had successfully made me a voyeur as well.
That transition of the viewer's role is disturbing.
And Jack goes from that moment of "harmless" and pleasurable porn viewing and fantasy to a realization of the depth of exploitation involved.
The ending is covered in filth, waste, inhumanity. When Jack finally kills the man responsible for his brother's death, his grim, angry face doesn't just laugh, it cackles. Has he cracked? The article I linked to above makes that case, but I don't think so. That would imply he has, at that point, lost his moral code. I think he never had one. So the laugh, in my view, is instead a proof point: He is a psychopath.
And so, when he ultimately is shot in the head and lies in the filthy tide, I was shocked, but not, in the least, sad.
After the police show up at the mansion and pull all the partiers outside, the director presents them to us -- almost as a line-up. (He is cutting between this and other scenes).
These people, formerly drugged-up, naked, and otherwise debauched, looked like a cross-section of English society.
After a movie of being a voyeur looking at the dangerous world of gangster violence and sex, we now find ourselves looking at ... ourselves.
The rough, hand-held style relied on a "foreground obstruction" aesthetic, too -- the motion of the camera and the intervening objects/people divided our attention between
the story as an objective thing, and made me at least feel as though we are seeing found footage from a documentary that is asking us to form an opinion from a mass of distracting elements.
Later, the obstructions, distractions, and extras change from being incidental to the story to becoming central to the story.
I got the sense right away that Jack Carter had come home to figure out what happened to his brother. He clearly didn't buy the drunk driving accident myth. And yet Jack shaving over his brother's coffin (showing no respect) and then his covering his brother's face (showing respect) communicates ambiguity about Jack's character. Is he an anti-hero taking on a moral vendetta, standing in for any of us who have seen or been victim to injustice? Or is he something else?
The sex started out as fun, and the women were beautiful. The way it was shot (the rocking chair scene, for example) used women in the foreground (or, Britt's legs in the foreground) to bring them forward in our awareness without them being the main plane of focus (either Jack on the phone or Britt's beautiful and erotic face). The rocking chair evoked the sounds and rhythms of sex but was absurdly quirky - a real point of humor, I think, but the beginning of how the director starts to blend sex, violence and humor.
We also see at the end of the rocking horse scene that the phone sex was not with Jack's monogamous partner, but that he was deeply in the erotic imagination of a woman attached to another man, and he was forcefully and unapologetically going to exploit his position there.
Even though what we learn about Jack in the rocking chair scene by itself happens to thousands or millions of people, in the context of the shaving scene and his penchant for paying people to do his bidding (at their risk) or to non-apologize apologize, we begin to see him as emotionally ill or detached. Not just an anti-hero.
Also early in the movie when there is a sex scene, before the audience gets a chance to let their heart slow down, bad guys show up to menace Jack - with the timing of the arrival of bad guys quickly converging precisely on the moment of intercourse.
Jack confidently wields a large gun and forces bad guys onto the street, following after them with no compunction, is funny ... but at the same time showing something menacing about Jack. A lack of shame becomes somehow foreshadowing for a deep lack of morality or empathy.
So now we get to the question: Is he a psychopath? The cruel language he uses with women, his roughness with them, particularly in the beginning, could perhaps at the time be understood as a grieving brother amidst prostitutes who were hiding information about his brother's death. But from 2015 -- and from the perspective of what we learn about Jack by the end of the movie -- he was a misogynist. Indeed, the disturbing scene where he gives his ex-brother's lover/regular prostitute an overdose shows him as calculating and without any empathy.
It's interesting to me that the core moment when Jack learns the motivation for everyone's bad before -- seeing Doreen in a porn film -- he goes from enjoying the film to being devastated. This is precisely what I was going through. I loved the beautiful women in the film and was willing to suspend my critique of their characters for some cinematic pleasure. But as the characters were having sex, the director was presenting them to us as a voyeur. The director's style was voyeuristic, and he had successfully made me a voyeur as well.
That transition of the viewer's role is disturbing.
And Jack goes from that moment of "harmless" and pleasurable porn viewing and fantasy to a realization of the depth of exploitation involved.
The ending is covered in filth, waste, inhumanity. When Jack finally kills the man responsible for his brother's death, his grim, angry face doesn't just laugh, it cackles. Has he cracked? The article I linked to above makes that case, but I don't think so. That would imply he has, at that point, lost his moral code. I think he never had one. So the laugh, in my view, is instead a proof point: He is a psychopath.
And so, when he ultimately is shot in the head and lies in the filthy tide, I was shocked, but not, in the least, sad.
After the police show up at the mansion and pull all the partiers outside, the director presents them to us -- almost as a line-up. (He is cutting between this and other scenes).
These people, formerly drugged-up, naked, and otherwise debauched, looked like a cross-section of English society.
After a movie of being a voyeur looking at the dangerous world of gangster violence and sex, we now find ourselves looking at ... ourselves.