Film: A Dark-Humor Master Gets A Camera

MARTIN McDONAGH’S cellphone is not long for the world after the Sundance Film Festival ends on Jan. 26. He hates the thing, he says.

Anna Manahan, left, Brian F. O’Byrne and Marie Mullen in a 1998 production of Martin McDonagh’s “Beauty Queen of Leenane” by the Atlantic Theater Company.

He acquired it last winter at the insistence of producers who were, after all, letting him direct his first feature film, “In Bruges.” He carried it around that Belgian city as the film, starring Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson and Ralph Fiennes, was being shot. He had it with him last month when he broke off a holiday jaunt in Los Angeles to fly to New York to talk about the movie. And it will be in his pocket on Thursday when “In Bruges” opens the Sundance festivities in Park City, Utah. Then, he said, “I’ll hit it with a hammer or something.”

His diffident, gap-toothed smile and generally mild demeanor strongly suggest that he’s joking. He jokes a lot, slyly and very quietly. But those who know his plays could be forgiven for wondering. They’ve seen disinterred bones smashed to splinters in “A Skull in Connemara.” They’ve watched treasured figurines cruelly melted into glop in “The Lonesome West.” They’ve cringed as a hot stove becomes an instrument of torture in “The Beauty Queen of Leenane.” And they’ve laughed as, yes, a cellphone is beaten and then shot at in “The Lieutenant of Inishmore,” after the owner, a fanatical Irish terrorist, receives dismaying news about his adored pet cat, Wee Thomas.

Fusing the hideous with the funny is a McDonagh specialty, and “In Bruges” affords him ample opportunity (although not much property is destroyed). The film centers on the relationship between a neophyte hit man, played by Mr. Farrell, and his more experienced partner, Mr. Gleeson. They have been ordered to the medieval splendor of Bruges to await further instructions after a badly botched job, and they deal with their forced vacation in predictably different ways. Mr. Gleeson’s steady, reliable Ken tramps up the stairs to see the view from the famous bell tower; Mr. Farrell’s mercurial Ray stays behind to taunt a family of American tourists.

The hit-man-on-the-lam scenario may be shopworn, and so are the odd-couple and fish-out-of-water devices. But fans of Mr. McDonagh’s theater work, set mostly in the Irish countryside from which his parents had emigrated, know that he creates stock situations only to subvert them. “It’s the anarchist in me,” he said. Don’t expect anything familiar.

The movie began to take shape four years ago when Mr. McDonagh left his home in London for a weekend in Bruges. He was first struck by “how beautiful the place was.” And he wondered why no one had ever used its picture-postcard streets and canals in a movie. By his second day, however, “having gone around to every single place twice, because it’s so small,” he couldn’t shake his sense of boredom.

The conversation in his head — “This is boring, this is beautiful; this is wonderful, there are no girls” — evolved into Ken and Ray, the older man dazzled and moved by Bruges, the callow one unable to understand why, in Mr. McDonagh’s words, “anybody would want to spend two minutes in the place.”

He turned them into hit men so he could get them to Bruges together. “And it just almost wrote itself from there,” he said, in that disarming way he has of both shrugging off his talent and displaying it. When yet another hit goes awry, Mr. Fiennes, as the icy, foul-mouthed boss, arrives to set things straight, and the comedy gives way to a darker inquiry into justice, honor and selflessness.

The gangster motif allowed Mr. McDonagh to explore a theme he had long wanted to tackle. “I’d always been irritated by macho films with guns and bullets flying everywhere,” he said. “I’d wondered where the stray bullets go. What happens when a bullet hits the wrong target?” He prefers not to analyze his own work, but under pressure he took a stab: “It’s kind of a black comedy about despair,” he offered. Then, with the crack timing so evident in his writing, he added, “I don’t think they’re going to put that on the poster.”

Since “a black comedy about despair” could pretty much describe everything he’s done, and he makes regular, offhand remarks about being “screwed up,” it’s worth noting that he comes off as normal, not weird. This inventor of dozens of sadistic acts performed in the vilest of families insists he did not have a traumatic childhood.

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