When all else fails, direct. Michael Keaton deserves a career like any former Batman. Only a couple years away from the inevitable autumnal comeback, the onetime Beetlejuice offers his left-field directorial debut, the ironically named The Merry Gentleman.
Ascetically unfolding in a minor key—and set during Christmas for extra tonal collision—Keaton stars as the gazillionith on-screen taciturn hitman. To its credit, Gentleman arrives so late to the post-Tarantino game that it can basically be forgiven. And it does offer a slightly fresh variation: His genuinely suicidal assassin is introduced burying his face into his palm—shortly before he splatters some mark’s brains across a car window.
The dour proceedings get a huge lift from co-lead Kelly Macdonald, doing her adorably vulnerable routine—and in her native brogue too—as an office monkey who starts a super tentative relationship with Keaton’s moody baddie. She’s always drawn to the wrong men, it turns out; in her past lies an abusive husband who eventually materializes as a regretful, born-again ham (Bobby Cannavale).
Though officially funereal, Gentleman squeezes in some comic asides, particularly in the sweetly fumbling scenes between Keaton and Macdonald. Producer Tom Bastounes, who handed Keaton the director’s chair after a ruptured appendix, provides some more funny as the third wheel: a tubby sad-sack detective pining puppydog-like for Macdonald.
Gentleman is a free-floating portrait of three ultimately incompatible loners, missing the splashy/contrived caper that’s typically required of the film’s genre. That’s its blessing and curse: It’s at once too meandering and too studied, with stiff camera movements, thumb-twiddling God talk and a mood so heavy the film routinely feels like it’ll topple over.
Keaton, like his film, is subdued to a fault, but given that he hasn’t had a decent gig since the Clinton administration, his performance sports an extra layer of pathos. He looks weathered and dejected, and the lighting reveals the deep fissures in his face. The film’s raison d’etre is clear: Save this guy from another White Noise. C+
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