Seven Psychopaths (2012)

Official trailer

Seven Psychopaths is the Martin McDonagh-directed crime comedy that became one of the major Irish-Anglo-American genre productions of the early 2010s.

McDonagh wrote and directed. The film was his second feature after In Bruges (2008). Colin Farrell plays Marty, a struggling alcoholic Irish screenwriter trying to write a film called Seven Psychopaths. Sam Rockwell plays Billy, Marty’s best friend and a part-time dog kidnapper. Christopher Walken plays Hans, Billy’s older partner in the dog-kidnapping operation. Woody Harrelson plays Charlie Costello, a Los Angeles gangster whose Shih Tzu Billy has stolen.

Tom Waits plays Zachariah Rigby, a serial killer.

Olga Kurylenko plays Charlie’s girlfriend Angela. Abbie Cornish plays Marty’s girlfriend Kaya. The plot follows Marty’s attempts to write his screenplay, the consequences of Billy and Hans’s dog-kidnapping operation when they take Charlie’s beloved dog, and the gradual collision between Marty’s fictional psychopaths and the actual psychopaths surrounding him.

Mean, silly and show-offy, Seven Psychopaths is a crime comedy I have a blast with. Walken and Rockwell are having so much fun that I forgive most of the times it trips over its own cleverness. The middle gets crowded and the jokes about screenwriting start to pile up, and that’s the gap between an 8 and something higher.

The film made approximately thirty-three million dollars worldwide on a fifteen million dollar budget. The commercial performance was modest. The critical reception was strong, especially among critics engaged with metafiction and genre-aware comedy. The film is consistently cited as a notable McDonagh credit between In Bruges and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017). The performances by Walken, Rockwell, and Harrelson have drawn particular praise. The film’s metafictional commitment and its tonal management of comedy and violence have established it as one of the more accomplished genre-aware productions of the early 2010s.

The Metafictional Structure

The film works on multiple narrative levels at once. Marty is writing a screenplay called Seven Psychopaths. The film the audience is watching is also called Seven Psychopaths. The fictional psychopaths Marty is trying to invent for his screenplay turn out to be the actual people surrounding him.

The psychopath stories Marty hears throughout the film either become his screenplay material or turn out to be retellings of psychopath stories he’s already supposed to know about. The metafiction isn’t subtle. The film acknowledges its own construction throughout.

The technique is risky. Metafictional cinema often collapses under its own self-awareness. The audience disengages from the story because they’re continuously reminded that the story is constructed. Seven Psychopaths survives the risk by committing to the metafictional content while also delivering on the genre material the metafiction is commenting on. The audience experiences both tones. The crime-genre plot has stakes. The metafictional commentary has wit. The combination isn’t always smooth. The film survives anyway because McDonagh’s specific tonal management keeps the two tones from completely undermining each other.

Most of the time I’m happy to play along. The stretches where Marty’s screenplay and the real psychopaths collide are where I laugh hardest, and the stretches where the film stops to admire its own cleverness are where I start checking the clock.

The Walken Performance

Christopher Walken plays Hans with sustained understated commitment. The character is the older partner in the dog-kidnapping operation, a man whose calm authority steadies the film’s escalating chaos. Hans’s wife is dying of cancer in a hospital throughout the film. His relationship with her, the philosophical positions he’s developed across his life, and his quiet acceptance of the violence that surrounds him all combine into a much-praised supporting performance from late in Walken’s career.

The Hans character shows Walken’s specific late-career strength. The performance doesn’t draw on the menacing-eccentric persona that defined his middle-career work. Hans is decent, patient, and morally specific. The character’s late-film confession that he is the Quaker from one of the film’s psychopath stories, the father who stalked his daughter’s killer for decades, is one of the film’s most accomplished individual sequences. Walken delivers the confession with sustained quiet that makes the violence underneath it visible.

That confession is the scene I’d rate the whole film on. Walken barely raises his voice, the violence sits right under every word, and I think it’s the finest thing he’s done in his late career. I’d sit through the movie again for those few minutes alone.

The Tonal Management

The film’s most accomplished craft achievement is its sustained tonal management between comedy and violence. McDonagh has been working in this tone since his theatrical career began in the 1990s. The Leenane plays (The Beauty Queen of Leenane, A Skull in Connemara, The Lonesome West) and the later plays (The Pillowman, The Lieutenant of Inishmore) all work on the comedy-violence intersection. Seven Psychopaths brings the same tone into American cinema.

What the technique involves is staging violent events with the comedic timing of jokes while staging comedic events with the tonal weight of violent ones. The audience laughs at moments designed to be horrific and falls silent during moments designed to be funny. The reversal generates effects that neither pure comedy nor pure violence can produce. The technique requires absolute control. Errors collapse the tone into either flat comedy or excessive grimness. Seven Psychopaths sustains the control for most of its runtime. Some sequences fail. Most succeed.

Most of the time I think McDonagh pulls it off, and when he doesn’t the film goes flat in a hurry. A couple of the middle sequences stack violence on jokes on more jokes until I stop feeling either, and I’d have cut ten minutes from that stretch without losing anything I care about.

Is Seven Psychopaths worth watching?

An 8, and a fond one. Walken, Rockwell and Harrelson are all in top form, Billy’s pitched shootout ending is the funniest idea in the film, and McDonagh’s mix of comedy and violence works far more often than it misfires.

It loses points for a crowded middle and for the stretches where the metafiction smothers the crime story it’s supposed to be commenting on, and those stretches frustrate me because the film is sharp enough without them. Watch In Bruges first, then this.

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