It is hard to argue that John Michael McDonagh is a superior filmmaker to his brother, Martin. The highs are higher with Martin and the lows are lower with John Michael; however John Michael has fallen by the wayside, forgotten about, and this disregards the scope and quality of his career.
Both brothers have had films released in the most recent year. Martin’s The Banshees of Inisherin debuted to career best reviews and a barrage of awards buzz and John Michael’s The Forgiven opened to the opposite, resulting in a world-wide box office gross of just over $1 million. These two releases highlight the ever-widening gap in the artistic reputation of the two brothers.
John Michael McDonagh began his directing career with 2011’s The Guard, a darkly comedic mismatched buddy cop film starring frequent McDonagh brother’s collaborator Brendan Gleeson. The film ponders mortality, questioning the difference in morality between law enforcement and criminals and upending notions of the binary moral and amoral. But what it does particularly well is creating a flawed hero in Gleeson’s Jerry Boyle. Boyle’s extraordinarily not politically correct remarks or exertions somehow speak a cosmic truth, not because what he is saying/doing is right but it means that he actually cares, he is one of the only few remaining police officers not corrupted by the crime organisation featured in the film. This is what McDonagh hypotheses: no one is entirely good or entirely evil, but if you can choose to do the right thing, the objectively right thing, you can hold your head high and maybe even survive an exploding boat.
McDonagh operates best when interrogating what makes a man righteous (and it is mainly men), and this is most prominent in his second feature, Calvary (2014). Gleeson is the focal point of the film as Father James, a priest who is told he is going to be killed in a week’s time. The film then follows Gleeson on his daily duties as town priest as he contemplates his virtue and value, through interactions with his parishioners and non-parishioners, including his returning daughter who questions his preferential role as a priest over his parental duties. Despite this, the film retains the inherent goodness of Father James until the film’s climatic showdown where his neglect in tackling the Catholic Church’s widespread child sexual abuse is scrutinised by childhood sexual abuse victim, Jack Brennan (Chris O’Dowd). The film ends with an angry retaliation against the Catholic Church, however it never replaces anger with complexity. Nothing is ever black or white in a John Michael McDonagh world.
Calvary is, arguably, McDonagh’s most critically acclaimed film, so to follow it up he made his most critically loathed film — so loathed as to not even receive an American cinematic distribution — 2016’s War on Everybody. McDonagh’s take on American amoral corrupt cops is extraordinarily messy and only mildly amusing. It was a misstep for McDonagh. Allowed to run amok by the “hands-off producers” leaving him to not be “censored in any way,” the film is a cacophony of tonal switches and ultimately confused. With McDonagh unsure how to attune his purview to the expanse of America, from small town Ireland. He graduated from subtle and incisive commentary to loud and broad observations of uncharted terrain.
Similarly, McDonagh ventured into further uncharted terrain with his most recent film, The Forgiven, as it is adapted from the Lawrence Osborne novel of the same name — the first time McDonagh has not written his own original screenplay. Subsequently hemming in his creative ambition and freedom, The Forgiven is a jarring antithesis to War on Everything’s undiluted vision. However, McDonagh’s film, in this case, succeeds in this unfamiliar territory. While the film debuted to middling reviews at the festival circuits, it is a genuinely enthralling journey of a man’s enlightenment while simultaneously straddling a satire of the uber-wealthy and their cultural ignorance.
The film begins with couple David (Ralph Fiennes) and Jo (Jessica Chastain) running over and killing a young Moroccan boy, Driss (Omar Ghazaoui), and eventually develops into David traversing into the heart of the Moroccan desert with Driss’ father, Anouar (Saïd Taghmaoui). This is the crux of The Forgiven; David’s burgeoning realisation of the person he has become — a person who can kill an innocent boy and turn a blind eye. McDonagh has described the film as an “old-fashioned noir: tense, starry, good-looking,” and that is what you get: a film that doesn’t get made anymore. You are dazzled by the good-looking stars like Matt Smith, Christopher Abbot and Abbie Lee, the desert vistas and the luxurious outfits, but also treated to a taut journey of rediscovery. The critical indifference around the film is puzzling as the very people pining for cinema made for adults reject it when it is made.
McDonagh, now, seems weary of the film industry and its audiences; berating the effect Marvel has had on audiences, subsequently retiring from writing original scripts and citing critics and audiences’ ignorance of originality, saying, “if nobody cares […] why go to all that extra effort?” A dejected McDonagh has seen his status of promising filmmaker devolve to reliably interesting director to the now marginalised brother of Martin who is regarded as the more talented, the more successful writer-director.
Despite this now-perceived notion, John Michael and Martin’s careers follow similar trajectories: they both made low-budget British crime films (The Guard and 2008’s In Bruges) which marked them as names to remember and eventually advanced to the States to make films that didn’t quite fulfill their potential (War on Everyone and 2012’s Seven Psychopaths). Martin’s Oscar-winning Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri (2017) is the film that distinctly separates the British-Irish brothers, with Martin again tipped to be heavily involved in another Oscars season while John Michael attempts to adapt another novel, “Fear is the Rider” by Kenneth Cook.
The McDonagh’s films, however, are still imbricated within one another. John Michael’s sophomore outing, Calvary, is intrinsically linked to Martin’s latest outing, The Banshees of Inisherin. Both are depictions of small-town Ireland made with a specific shared interest in masculinity and an atmosphere of impending doom. There is a sense that there isn’t enough room for both jet-black humorists in Hollywood and the industry, the critics, and the audiences have picked their fighter.
Maybe one day The Forgiven will earn underrated classic status, or John Michael will return to original scriptwriting, but presently he is being forgotten and disregarded by the critics and the average cinema-goer. But he will keep on questioning morality and interrogating the virtue of men, even if it is based on a book.
