Cracked Actor: Colin Farrell
BY
Mark Asch
On everyone’s favorite early aughts bad-boy sinner, Colin Farrell.
In Bruges plays at Metrograph from Friday, December 29 as part of Yuletide Sublime.
In her new memoir The Woman in Me, Britney Spears describes her brief dalliance with Colin Farrell, in early 2003, as “a two-week brawl. Brawl is the only word for it—we were all over each other, grappling so passionately it was like we were in a street fight.” Spears was, she writes, still reeling from her very public break-up with America’s sweetheart Justin Timberlake, and the state-managed tease of her jailbait persona was collapsing in on itself under the pressure of tabloid scrutiny. Farrell was then the hottest thing in Hollywood, and its leading party animal, and photos of the two mugging on the red carpet at the premiere of The Recruit (2003) are a beautiful snapshot of a lost time: Spears in low-rise, presumably bootcut pants and a lace cam-style going-out top, Farrell in an open graphic-print button-up shirt and blazer, very many leather and beaded bracelets, and gelled hair. You can practically hear the sound of molars hard at work on a stick of Wrigley’s.
In recent years, as the 20-year nostalgia cycle turns its attention to the maligned fameballs of the aughts, there has arisen an entire cottage industry dedicated to pointing out the ways in which Spears in those days was treated cruelly and unfairly by the press. But spare a thought for Farrell, similarly something of a pop-cultural sin eater during the early, vicious years of the emerging digital media, who has since described much of the first decade of his career as a blank space in his memory, in which he was barely holding it together onscreen. Since getting sober—a time period that by far constitutes the majority of his career—Farrell has continued to carry himself with the self-exposing candor of his halcyon wild days before cameraphones or much media coaching (such as when he infamously told Playboy “heroin’s fine in moderation,” and “I ate a lot of pussy [in Ireland], but I never saw a vagina until I came [to Hollywood]” ). The difference is that now he’s gamely playing along. He rides with probing questions and sick jokes at the expense of his addictive appetites, brushes with self-destruction, (consensual) bed-hopping, and widely beloved sex tape, while his finest film performances embody the euphoria of self-indulgence and the panic and shame of a comedown.
In Bruges (2008)
Perhaps the director who has best understood Farrell’s bad-boy blend of charm and chastisement is Martin McDonagh. Farrell arrived in Hollywood from Dublin relatively unseasoned, and in profiles from those days was frequently held up as a quintessentially Irish-diaspora figure: flirty, sentimental, hard-drinking, and frank—here for a good time, not a long time. McDonagh’s In Bruges (2008)—which was shot not long after Farrell emerged from rehab and weathered an encounter with a stalker on the set of The Tonight Show—trades on Farrell’s Irishness explicitly, as a window into Catholic guilt. In doing so, In Bruges launched the second act of Farrell’s career. He won a Golden Globe for the role (at a ceremony during which, while presenting a prize, he sniffled, and ad-libbed, “I have a cold. It’s not the other thing”); it was the only significant acting award of his career prior to his reunion with McDonagh on The Banshees of Inisherin (2022).
About two lowlifes laying low in Belgium after a botched hit, McDonagh’s first film is a hitman hangout full of loquacious, un-PC dialogue and slapstick violence, as well as a pained strain of soul-searching—a Tarantino movie that self-flagellates. Over opening credits taking in the forbidding Gothic architecture of the old cathedral city, Farrell describes a murder, and we understand that his stay in Bruges is a purgatorial interlude. Miserable in the quaint tourist town and freezing in the December air, Farrell’s guilt-stricken, inexperienced first-time killer Ray hunches under the turned-up collar of his coat.
Ray is alternately hedonist and penitent, and Farrell makes his character’s dueling impulses to pleasure and self-pity nakedly, affectingly apparent. Farrell is such a transparent actor, his face so active and his energy so bad-student fidgety, that he’s good at playing dumb. There’s a slight hop to his movements when he remembers something; he’s often open-mouthed, as if the words are taking longer than expected to arrange themselves into a sentence. After Ray gets his hands on some cocaine, Farrell, shifting his weight around anxiously, blurts out ill-advised observations in forced, awkward cadences, constantly overtaken by thoughts that are too big for him.
When Ray admits that he’s been contemplating suicide ever since he killed a little boy while carrying out his hit, he is so shaky here, all Ray’s addled bluster fallen away. Contemplating the morality of suicide, scared and filled with self-loathing, he is struggling spiritually and intellectually—and physically, too, blinking back tears and shivering as if his body were sobbing in the cold. In a city whose museums, McDonagh reminds us, are filled with Boschian dreamscapes depicting hell and divine punishment, Ray’s fellow hitman Ken (Brendan Gleeson) and boss Harry (Ralph Fiennes) refer to Ray as “the boy,” and argue over his essential culpability for the murder that he committed at their behest.
Phone Booth (2002)
The question of Farrell’s guilt or innocence was inscribed in his star image from his earliest days. Joel Schumacher, who gave Farrell his big break in Tigerland (2000), directed him again as Farrell was on the way up, in Phone Booth (2002), in which Farrell plays Stu, a B-list publicist who works the gossip columnists, plants stories, talks out of both sides of his mouth—not least when he steps into a phone booth to call a cute aspiring actress from a line that he doesn’t share with his wife.
When the telephone surprisingly rings, the phone booth becomes a confession booth, as a sniper keeps Stu trained in his sights, demanding he admit his sins, mortal and venial (vanity, attempted infidelities), to his wife and the growing Dog Day Afternoon-like crowd of gaping bystanders. Seen through the God’s eye view of a gunsight, Stu shatters like the plexiglass of the booth. Farrell begins the movie in operator mode, in a D&G suit and shiny red-purple dress shirt, but over the course of the film—which was shot sequentially—he sweats the styling product out of his hair, conveying the desperation that was always driving Stu’s glitzy front.
Farrell’s subsequent stardom landed him in a couple of the most significant films of the 2000s, where his haunted mien adds resonant depths. In Miami Vice (2006), taking over a Reagan-era avatar played by Don Johnson, Farrell’s Sonny Crockett sleepwalks through drug busts and shootouts, a dissociative action star for a movie about the self-deceptions and duplicity of undercover work. (As a cop, he’s playing the role of a flamboyant drug smuggler, but when he gets to with Gong Li, he undersells his outrageous dialogue, giving even “I’m a fiend for mojitos” an alluring sincerity, and reminding that the best flirts never seem to be flirting.) In The New World (2005), Farrell’s Captain John Smith walks through Eden like he’s walking on eggshells, clinging to Q’orianka Kilcher’s Pocahontas so desperately, hyperconscious already of the original sin of American colonialism. Crockett and Smith both seem to have a guilty conscience; equally, Farrell’s heavy soulfulness made him a disastrous choice for his highest-profile misfire, Oliver Stone’s Alexander (2004). Buying into Stone’s conflicted, Oedipal interpretation of the title role, Farrell is earnest, whiny, teary and shouty, seemingly overawed and confused, a lost little boy in a blond dye job and tunic. History seems like something that happens to him.
Miami Vice (2006)
Even playing the conqueror of most of the known world, Farrell is a reactive actor. McDonagh cast him as an Irish screenwriter named Martin in his self-reflexive Seven Psychopaths (2012), and Farrell makes a sympathetic and harried straight man amid the chaotic mugging and metafictional curlicues. At one point in the film, a dognapper played by Sam Rockwell ponders why “poodles always look like they’ve been crying”—the joke, hammered home with additional dialogue during a tight close-up on an, indeed, very sad-eyed canine, is that it looks like Farrell.
His puppy-dog eyes sit beneath two great big black eyebrows, an extra furrow in his forehead, giving his face a permanently worried, quizzical look. The eyebrows are so expressive—they go up at the inside top corners and almost meet in the middle—that even the slightest movement registers, looking as if they were drawn on by a particularly emphatic animator. His dark, darting eyes flicker with insinuation as they scan the room; or else peer out from under crinkled brows in a morning-after haze of dawning embarrassment. They draw attention to Farrell’s incredible transparency, his ability to play dumb, pathetic, or devilish—and his ability to connect emotionally with anyone he’s talking to, from a red-carpet journalist to a scene partner or viewer. He simply can’t keep a poker face. He’s a man with no secrets.
Farrell’s reserves of sensitivity serve him well in many of his best performances, particularly in smaller films, like Neil Jordan’s Ondine (2009), a gentle fairy tale, or After Yang (2021). In the latter, he plays a tea shop owner; there’s a stillness to Farrell as he carries out his tea rituals, a sense of sobriety and resignation. The pared-down affect also works in his two films for Yorgos Lanthimos, The Lobster (2015) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017): when filtered through the nervy old Catholic schoolboy Farrell, the flat affect that Lanthimos prefers from his actors suggests a man humbled, fearful of discipline.
Farrell, whose mother Rita used to regularly accompany him to his premieres, has always loved older women—he has claimed he lost his virginity in his early teens to a 36-year-old Australian he met clubbing, he offered himself to Dame Eileen Atkins as a 70th birthday present, and he forged a deep emotional bond with Elizabeth Taylor in the last years of her life—and there’s a momma’s boy undercurrent to his role in The Beguiled (2017), as the wounded Union soldier John McBurney, who is nursed back to health by Southern belles at a girls’ school on a plantation somewhere in Dixie.
The Beguiled (2017)
In Sofia Coppola’s remake of the 1971 Don Siegel original, Farrell’s McBurney is far more Romantic than Clint Eastwood’s—he’s dark, like a cloistered woman of the era might imagine Heathcliff or Rochester, and his uniform makes him dangerous, but he’s also physically vulnerable. (In another memoir by an ex of Farrell’s, Your Voice in My Head, Emma Forrest refers to the actor as “G.H.,” for “Gypsy Husband.”)
McBurney is unfailingly polite and soft-spoken as he sweet-talks each of the women of the house in turn. Once his injured leg heals, whose bedroom will he visit? Farrell is so emotionally promiscuous that it’s genuinely suspenseful. McBurney doesn’t do the pragmatic thing, and visit Nicole Kidman’s headmistress, or the honorable thing, and visit Kirsten Dunst’s teacher—he does something so stupid that it must be honest, and visits Elle Fanning’s student. Having stirred each of the women’s desires, he then meets with retribution in the form of a symbolic castration, and banishment from the women’s world.
How fitting The Beguiled is for Farrell, an actor who seems, both offscreen and on, to be carrying on a discourse on sin and the possibility of redemption. McBurney’s sexual exploits become everyone’s business—a situation familiar to that of Farrell, the subject, like Britney Spears, of countless prudish late-night punchlines, and a man who, no less than Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, will never be allowed to live down his sex tape. An Icarus for the age of TMZ, Farrell promises the thrill of transgression, and dutifully absorbs the sting of punishment.
Mark Asch is the author of Close-Ups: New York Movies and a contributor to Film Comment, The Criterion Collection, Reverse Shot, Screen Slate, Little White Lies, Animus, and elsewhere.
In Bruges (2008)
