Review by
Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Sam O'Mahony
Starring: Senan Jennings, Darrell D’Silva, Lisa Dwyer Hogg, Paul Mallon, Joanne
Crawford
Eh, yoo, shut da fok up and listen, ya freakin' mook. Da deal is ders did
kid, right, and his mom's stuck raising him alone cos pops left to become
a singer - yeh, regular fokkin' Sinatra over here. Usual story: Kid's a
loner, gets his ass kicked on the regular in school. His teacher filling
his head about God and Jesus and da Holy freakin' Ghost while da other
kids be breakin' his balls. His mom's pushed to the fokkin' edge. One
thing da kid got going for him is a bunch of old VHS tapes of dose
gangster films from back in the day. Ya know da ones,
Scarface, The King of New York, the classics; kid can't get enough of 'em. He’'s alright... for a
schnook. But imagine the look on his lil face when he comes across a
real-life wise guy just hiding out in the woods by his pop's new digs, and
what's more this goodfella ends up taking the kid under his wing.
Fuggedaboutit!
That's the outline of Sam O'Mahony's poignant feature debut,
The Wise Guy, in which Senan Jennings' (superb) Francis, an adolescent
old-school gangster movie obsessive, does indeed befriend
Darrell D'Silva's unusual mentor in the unlikely surroundings of an
Irish woodland. Or does he? The VHS tapes which Francis cherishes used to
belong to his estranged dad for one thing, and the titular wise guy
conforms to every last cliché within the hyperbolic diegesis of the movies
which the tapes preserve; British D'Silva's intonation is an approximation
of what you'd expect a Bronx hotdog seller to sound like. Francis is a
sensitive kid - he tends to the neglected pot plants of his school, giving
rise to his catchphrase "I'm a dendrologist" - and someone in seeming
requirement of a male role model.
O'Mahony's film thoughtfully explores how young boys need to look up to
older men, and what sort of masculine archetypes they are drawn to.
Furthermore, The Wise Guy extends this thesis to
incorporate, via Joanne Crawford's well meaning but misguided
teacher, the role which religious indoctrination plays in this sort of
aspirational thinking. An excuse for why Francis is bullied in school is
that his father is an atheist, which gives the playground tribalists
ammunition to other him with, and, as the film goes on, Francis configures
the wise guy as a Second Coming in a confused bricolage of adult
influence.
Thomas McKeown's cinematography is gorgeous: deep colours
characterise the interiors, while the woods are rendered as a fantasia
hinterland wherein the unlikely duo nurse shrubs and act out tough guy
scenarios (with grandiose freeze frames and jump cuts, the "wise guy" bits
also pleasingly ape genre cinematic grammar). It is part of the film's
narrative dexterity that we are made slowly aware of the difficult and
intricate respective situations of Francis' parents, while the kid remains
clueless in his (perhaps) delusion. It's a shame that the film has such a
fealty to the profanity which characterise gangster films, as, with its
coming-of-age themes and adult issues related in such a careful and gentle
manner, The Wise Guy would work so well as a film for
intelligent children.
In a cultural climate where apparently "masculinity is in crisis" (i.e.,
male entitlement is increasingly not realised), with a subsequent rise of
the most banal, boring and toxic influencers preying on this
self-fulfilling insecurity, the concept of inappropriate male role models
is both intriguing (I Work With Young People and trust me, it's a problem:
a really, really, really fucking tiresome problem) and, despite its retro
context, timely. The Wise Guy challenges this rash dynamic,
questioning why boys need to look up to other men at all (Francis' father
is privy to a different self-deception, while his mother is doing her
absolute best while managing an emotional secret of her own). These films
which we idolise (the dorm poster of Scarface, any bloke of a certain age telling you that their favourite film is
The Godfatherzzzzz) reassure us that existence can be simple, with problems easily
solved with a gun and brute strength. That being part of a big boy's club
enables us to avoid the difficult complexities of life (a part of
Goodfellas' endless wonder is how perceptively it essays male companionship and
insecurity). The Wise Guy, with its bittersweet conclusion, offers no such simple resolutions.
The Wise Guy plays at the 2024
Belfast film Festival on November 9th.
