John Michael McDonagh‘s bombastic The Forgiven is a blackly comic drama that functions better while making broad observations of lingering colonialist attitudes and chasm-wide depictions of inequality than it does when it tries to dial itself back to a serious tale of self-realisation and atonement. While adapted from a novel by Lawrence Osborne it prickles with the barbed dialogue for which both McDonagh brothers are known. Yet, there is too much that fails to mesh in a satisfying way, leaving it a fairly underwhelming experience despite some obvious surface pleasures.
David and Jo (Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain) are a couple driving through the Moroccan desert to attend a lavish party thrown by their friends Dickie and Dally (Matt Smith and Caleb Landry Jones). They run over and kill a young Moroccan boy while arguing. The pair take the body to the estate, where Dickie quickly smooths things over with the local police. The next day, the boy’s father arrives and firmly insists that David accompany him back to his village to bury the boy as local customer dictates.
The opening scenes are pleasingly brash, as the flamboyant hosts mingle with their without-exception repellent guests, under the eyes of the glowering Moroccan staff. Fiennes gets his teeth into some gnarly casual racism and homophobia before being brought to heel by the imposing, implacable Abdellah (Ismael Kanater, finding more humanity in his character than most). His sparring with Chastain’s Jo is freighted with the ballast of years. Smith also shines as the louche Dicky.
However, once David and Jo are separated, the two plot threads find themselves in uneasy conversation. The vast majority of the narrative import lies in David’s fraught journey in the desert. While it’s enjoyable to watch Jo purr her way through a seduction with party boy Tom (an enjoyably oily Christopher Abbott), her sudden switch to a liberated woman is harder to parse through the lens of her complicity in the death of a young man.
Unfortunately, Jo’s libertine awakening is also the more enjoyable strand, retaining as it does the broad, bacchanalian satire of what went before. It also leads to some Sahara-dry aphorisms from their hosts’ employee, the disdainful Hamid (Mourad Zaoui). David’s slow trundle towards some semblance of redemption is posited as the moral thrust, but the generally light, even farcical, general tone of the film would fit a more straightforward case of karmic retribution. McDonagh’s attempt at a more nuanced outcome for David fails to impact as it should as there is nothing earlier in the film to lay the foundation for it.
The Forgiven is also guilty of wasting such talent as Caleb Landry Jones in what amount to little more than a preening cameo, and Abbey Lee as a boorish hedonistic tourist, although both do well with what they’re given. It’s telling that two performances that stand out (among the western actors at least) are from Matt Smith and Christopher Abbott as perhaps the two people who are completely aware of who they are, and make no pretense of being good or moral people.
It’s hard to see The Forgiven as anything other than a curate’s egg, made of some pleasingly abrasive parts but hanging together about as awkwardly as Fiennes in his incongruous kaftan later in the film. Knowing what McDonagh has been capable of in the past, such as the wonderful Calvary, it’s a genuine disappointment.
Screened as part of Edinburgh International Film Festival