44 Inch Chest
Cinema Nova, 29/04/2010
Status: So far behind I’m nearly lapping myself
In this, the Great Year of the Adaptation (which looks remarkably similar to last year), I have never been so sure, watching a film, that it was based on something else. 44 Inch Chest smacks of really good playwriting. Staging, dialogue, pacing and characterisation are all classically play-like and more than one scene evokes the heavies of playwriting like Harold Pinter. Yep, I was sure that it was a play adaptation. Turns out, this is one of the very few films I’ve seen so far this year that comes from an original screenplay. Not based on nuttin at all. Well, I’ll be stonkered.
RAY WINSTON (The Departed, The Proposition) plays Colin, a cuckolded hard man. His gang (IAN McSHANE, Deadwood; STEPHEN DILLANE, The Hours; TOM WILKINSON, Duplicity, Michael Clayton; JOHN HURT, Alien) kidnaps Colin’s wife’s new lover for Colin to torture and kill – the only appropriate response to save face and restore his masculinity. But Colin is having a crisis.
While the film revels in it’s stagey play-ness at the beginning - intense character dynamics, the cadence of delivery and the sounds of words (including an abundance of profanity) - it later employs all manner of film-type tricks with the same deftness from hallucinations to overlapping scenes to tricksy editing. It falters slightly in a spot or two (struggling with the shifts in tone between play-ness and film-ness), but I found it interesting on a few levels, and that’s always going to be a winner with me.
