Mention Troy Duffy’s 1999 The Boondock Saints and a few things come immediately to mind. It’s a cult classic, you might think, and you’d be right, for though it did poorly at the box office, it did exceptionally well in DVD sales. Or you might recall the story about how it was conceived by a bartender, which, in part due to Duffy and his self-aggrandizing descriptions of himself, rings of a mythical register. (Legend has it that Duffy thought up the idea in 1996 after seeing a dead woman being robbed by his neighbor. The occurrence filled Duffy with indignant ire, and so he wrote the film.) You might even think of the unabashedly unhinged character Willem Dafoe portrays.
What might not immediately come to mind is the film’s depiction of a positive masculinity that scans not only as nurturing but also safe within a film filled with grotesque slurs against everybody, and an appearance by the viscerally repellent Ron Jeremy. It’s a warm core The Boondock Saints has, which doesn’t get enough attention, and which Duffy perhaps himself forgets by the time he gets around to making the sequel in 2009. And it’s this warm core that I turned to literally every week when I was lonely, scared, anxious, and sad at 18. It’s salutary, this warmth that The Boondock Saints has, and it’s what makes it so the film, studded as it is by gross, for a lack of a better word, elements (the unforgivable slurs, Jeremy), remains worth revisiting.
It gave me a safe world to crawl into when I needed it the most.
The world about me at 18 was febrile, the details fuzzy as if blurred by my tears. I come from overprotective immigrant parents with a conservative bent. There wasn’t much I was allowed to do, such as living on campus away from home. So I had to commute to university. I mention this because it made a terrified wreck of me. Nevertheless, in the first year of university, I found myself thrown into public situations without relief and constrained in nearly every moment by a genuinely petrifying social anxiety. I was terrified to eat in public (in dining halls, at the bus terminal); my grades, if they depended on class participation, suffered because the thought of voicing my mind or even working to form thoughts worth voicing made me dry-heave. I was terrified of looking people in the eye. All this miasma of fear in my mind was prompted first and foremost by an irrational belief that any of my intuitive movements would incur an earth-rattling sort of punishment, something doled out frequently in my childhood.
Compounding this fear of external and public punishment was a dire kind of fear at home, one of my parents. Not for their overprotectiveness, but for their arguing and fighting and how it would rattle the walls, how I would have to stop up my ears with earbuds blasting music and then with my hands and close my eyes and focus on my breathing, not on my heart pounding as though trying to erupt through my chest. My dad would get scary then, particularly on Friday evenings after drinking. And so I developed a ritual — I had many rituals then.
My classes that first year ended at 12 P.M. every Friday , so I would commute back to an empty home (everyone else was at work or school), have a quick lunch, press play on my Boondock Saints DVD, and sit back and relax, even if it was only for a bit. I would look forward to this all week because it was the only time I felt my body ease up, my breathing steady, my mind focus on something other than myself. It was the only time I felt safe from the world, public and private, around me. It’s a weird ritual to have, looking forward to watching The Boondock Saints in 2011. But this movie that seems like it might be horrifically offensive to women paradoxically presented me with safe men practicing a kind of masculinity that hurt only the people who deserve it, reserving kindness and circumspection and soft touches for the good.
The movie has a simple plot, which is unsurprising if you know that Duffy wrote the screenplay at 26 without any previous screenwriting or film experience. It follows two Irish-immigrant brothers, Connor (Sean Patrick Flanery) and Murphy (Norman Reedus), in Boston who are deeply Catholic. On Saint Patrick’s Day, they get into a bar fight with members of the Russian mafia because the Russians come in trying to kick everyone out. The fight creeps into the next day when the Russian mafiosi show up at the brothers’ apartment wanting to kill them, but after a very emotional and violent altercation, the brothers kill the Russians. They are genuinely good guys, Connor and Murphy, raised by apparently diligent parents, so they turn themselves in to the police. But after an epiphanic moment that same night, the two realize they need to kill all the bad guys in the city who are above the law, those deep-crime mafiosi who have the power to avoid civil judgment and punishment. So with their friend Rocco (David Della Rocco), who’s trying to make it into the Italian mafia, the boys embark on a cleansing spree.
They are pursued by Willem Dafoe’s Paul Smecker, an FBI agent specializing in organized crime, and his team of local detectives. Smecker is preternaturally intelligent and extremely good at his job. He’s gay but also harbors a lot of internalized homophobia against the desires of his soul. Smecker is furthermore tortured by the structural red tape that keeps him from outright arresting the people he knows to be a part of organized crime. Smecker, as he pursues the boys, comes to be their biggest supporter and cheerleader, going on to aid and abet their crimes.
The morality here is black and white — the good are those hard-working people who support their families. The bad are those who kill the good people. But there is a hiccup in this definition. At the film’s start, the Monsignor (William Young) at the church that the brothers attend tells the congregants the story of Kitty Genovese, the 28-year-old woman who, in 1968, was raped and murdered as, according to a New York Times article from the time, 37 civilians watched but didn’t call the police. (This article has been criticized in recent years for misreporting the fact that several people did try to call the police.) This story, the Monsignor’s qualification of moral badness, sticks with the brothers and prompts their journey into vigilantism.
“Now we must all fear evil men, but there is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men,” the Monsignor says. This shakes the brothers to their core, as evidenced by a rapturous scene that I loved watching again and again at 18. Connor and Murphy are sleeping in a holding cell the night they confess to killing the Russian men in self-defense. It’s pouring rain outside and the wet seems to seep into their cell, falling on the sleeping brothers as though it were holy water. They are in separate beds but dressed similarly, in jeans without a shirt on, wearing their beaded crosses. The camera hovers over their dreaming chests as the Monsignor’s story seems to pass through both their minds in a dream. Thunder claps outside and the brothers both sit up in bed, as if pulled awake by some holy force. They both gasp, breathing heavily, and then look at each other. They have been brought up to be good men, but to be truly good men, they will need to fight indifference, act against the evil surrounding them. This is the epiphany that heralds their subsequent action.
It’s a spooky scene meant to hint at the brothers’ innate saintliness. But it’s also a beautiful scene, one I loved, and still do, not only for how the camera lingers over these beautiful men, but also how it cements their goodness. The Monsignor’s words like an injunction against them still rattle through both their heads, and they can’t stand the accusation of potential evilness within them. They need to be good, this scene says, assuring viewers that these boys will always protect those who need protecting. This is why my mind, which at 18 painted everything as a danger, in part due to the scariness I did experience, latched onto these brothers, kept on returning to them again and again.
But it’s not just their goodness that this scene paints that makes them safe. It’s also their unbridled love for each other as they wordlessly promise each other they will be good. The film also cements their love for Rocco and for Smecker, which they portray shamelessly. The brothers will do anything to protect each other — Connor literally pulls a toilet out of its foundation and throws it on the Russian mafioso who is about to kill Murphy. But Connor also will make sure that both Murphy and Rocco are able to protect themselves — any time he knows that either Murphy or Rocco is able to stand his own ground in a fight, he steps back and lets them learn. Connor is clearly the more responsible brother. Murphy, meanwhile, is the more irreverent, playful, and hotheaded brother, yelling at Rocco when he doesn’t realize that the Italian mafia doesn’t care whether he lives or dies, whooping with joy when any occasion calls for spontaneity.
This physical display of love was so new for me to witness, because it’s something that traditionally toxic masculinity might urge a man to keep under the wraps of his psyche. For example, when Rocco kills one of the bad guys he’s truly, viscerally spooked by, Connor gives him a kiss on his mouth, albeit through his hand. After they kill the Russians and Connor hurts his knee and is unable to walk and needs to go to the hospital, Murphy carries him, and then walks him to the police station, lending him his own body as a crutch. There is a stunning scene near the film’s end when Connor, Murphy, and Rocco have been gravely wounded in a shootout against Il Duce (Billy Connolly). The three, in the safety of Rocco’s home, cauterize each others’ wounds with a hot iron. This scene is beautiful for the way in which all three hold on to each other, hug each other, through the pain. You might say that of course they touch each other, they are experiencing extreme pain, but the film frames this physicality as more deliberate than reflexive. The three, especially Connor and Murphy, are positioned around one another in anticipation of their touch. When Connor is having his leg cauterized, Murphy is right behind him, holding him, his face in the crook of Connor’s neck. When Connor reaches for Murphy’s head as the iron meets his flesh, Murphy leans in more, but the fact remains that he was already there behind his brother, there to succor him. This display of unbridled physical love struck me when I was 18 because it showed me that this kind of love and kindness was possible, that it’s possible for family to show love physically, that bodies don’t always have to be scary and punishing.
And then there’s Dafoe’s Smecker. Smecker could be this film’s protagonist, so thoroughly unique and vibrant and fleshed out is he. We have an FBI agent who is not only preternaturally intelligent with cultural taste, but is also outrageous, generally unlikable, hostile about his sexuality, as though he hasn’t come to terms with it, and conflicted about his own morality. He is made out to have an almost Sherlock Holmes-ian kind of deductive skill at crime scenes (extremely rational and therefore very traditionally, ideally masculine), but he needs classical music playing as he solves crimes, his hands fluttering about him as though he were in a ballet; in this way his character upturns traditional masculinity by having it presented through traditionally feminine affectations. He falls for the brothers the moment he lays eyes on them, admiring their knack for languages (the brothers beguile him as they effortlessly flick between French, Gaelic, Russian, and German) and their closeness. He abandons himself within crime scenes, oftentimes getting the gore he’s surrounded with on himself. And he berates the detectives around him for being incompetent, but in a tough-love sort of way, challenging them to be more inquisitive and perceptive.
At the film’s climax, Smecker, after a night of drinking, goes into a confessional and, though he is an atheist, asks the priest whether what he feels — that what the brothers are doing, killing bad guys, is justified — is good or bad. Smecker is deeply troubled, as a person who stands for the law, at his cheering on of two boys as they do legal wrong. The film, through Smecker, shows that it is aware of the murkiness of vigilantism, of its problems alongside its benefits. And Dafoe portrays this deeply complicated drama through Smecker brilliantly. In talking to the priest in the confessional, he gets excited by the religious man’s words the same way he gets excited at crime scenes. He learns that, at the end of the day, all that matters is what your soul tells you, receiving the priest’s words with an openness despite the fact he confesses earlier that he’s not religious. Smecker’s soul tells him that the talented Irish boys are doing the right thing, that he will support them. This is a crucial moment for Smecker as he learns to trust his soul and his beliefs, and it hints at potential growth away from his internalized homophobia. If he is willing to side with the brothers’ vigilantism despite his formal training as an FBI agent, then perhaps he is also willing to overcome prejudices he’s learned from society, the film seems to say.
Dafoe in this movie is a marvel. Today, there is much well-placed praise on Dafoe for the work he’s done with Wes Anderson, Robert Eggers, Abel Ferrara, and Lars von Trier, but his performance in this less stylized and rough-around-the-edges cult classic is often overlooked. Dafoe grants so much humanity to Smecker, shows him to be a deeply flawed but powerful man who still has much to learn from two wayward Irish immigrants who in turn have their own beleaguered consciences. And just as Flanery and Reedus depict their characters’ inner feelings physically, so too does Dafoe throw caution to the wind. His uninhibited movements to classical music are effectively juxtaposed against the other hard-headed Irish cops’ traditionally masculine physical reservedness. In that delightful battle with Il Duce, Smecker demonstrates his frustration and passion through literal sweat and grandiose movements of the arms as though he were conducting a grand opera or performing a ballet. It’s so easy to see what the men in this movie are feeling and thinking; it’s not a mystery shrouded in restrained gazes and pursed lips. These characters and the actors who portray them communicate through their bodies in a way that is refreshingly uninhibited, unembarrassed, and confident that their feelings are valid.
When I was 18 — and even today — unbridled physicality was how I wished I could present in the world, with Connor and Murphy and Smecker’s confidence in dealing with perceived evil. So much of the world around me terrified me to immobility: the sound of my parents fighting had me turn into a ball on the ground; the movement of the world as I went to school portended punishment for some gross misstep I thought I would fall into if I didn’t pay attention to my body, if I didn’t constantly recall the proper way to be in public.
But The Boondock Saints, with all its flamboyant fluidity and depiction of an almost balletic movement in its core male characters, gave me hope by showing me not only that I might be protected by these men against the terrifying tides of the world, but also that I might learn from them how to be. This film that an A.V. Club review describes as “a series of violent setpieces,” that on the face of it seems like it will reek of a macho lust for violence and grotesquerie toward women, whether it knows it or not, depicts a kind of safe and healthy masculinity that is refreshing and warm, a way of being present in the world that isn’t constrained by anxieties, that doesn’t do injustice to our souls.
