Guy Ritchie is one of the biggest names in Hollywood talking about class dynamics. It's an odd thing to type but true. In his three decades of making films, the English filmmaker has been focused on stylish gents, explosive confrontations and impeccably soundtracked chase scenes. If you look at the guy, he’s often decked out in noveau aristocrat-style outfits. But he also, inexplicably, has been using his crime films to explore the class system and its dynamics.
Credit Christopher Raphael/STX
One of the few films I was able to see this year before the pandemic shut everything down was Ritchie's latest, The Gentlemen. On one hand, the January release date was a bit of a pause for concern, but Ritchie doing a British crime film again after his adventures in blockbusters — including gems like fantastic, surprisingly true to the books Sherlock Holmes series and the excellent and underrated The Man from UNCLE and misfires like the wonderfully scored but poorly written King Arthur: Legend of the Sword and the off-kilter live-action Aladdin — was something to look forward to.
First, let's be clear. The Gentlemen isn't Ritchie's best. It's not his worst either, but something about it just lacks that kind of energy and urgency that permeated his past movies. The story, as it's told to us second-hand in flashbacks via the devious and self-serving private investigator Fletcher (Hugh Grant), lacks some surprises, as twisty as some of the plot is. Mickey Pearson, an American pot kingpin played with laid back aplomb by Matthew McConaughey has made it big in the U.K. And wants to sell his empire and go legit. He's got to deal with a flowery billionaire (Succession's Jeremy Strong), a boisterous up-and-coming rival (Henry Golding) and a missing heiress to a noble family. All of this is relayed to the audience and Mickey's aide-de-camp Raymond (Charlie Hunnam) in a flowery story by Fletcher, with Grant having the time of his life equally antagonizing and hitting on Ray. Then there is a beleaguered yet badass boxing coach, a gang of tough, Youtube-streaming fighters called the Toddlers and a vengeful tabloid executive.
What makes the film more than a low-energy effort from Ritchie is its look at how Mickey relates to the landed gentry. He's new money, a man who “came up the hard way” and has enough capital to hobnob with the well off. He hides his pot farms on the lands of noble families, who after years of waste, excess and upkeep, happily take payments from the American interloper to maintain their estates, and in fact are indebted to him. Ritchie has explored the tiered class system, but never inherited wealth and status, which The Gentlemen cleverly does.
Ritchie's first feature is his working class crime yarn Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. A skilled gambler gets cheated into a debt of 500,000 pounds, and has to enlist his friends to rob his next door neighbors, a brutal gang that is robbing local drug dealers. The whole movie has a scrappy edge to it of guys trying to avoid thugs rather than come out on top with wealth. Half of the protagonists are hustlers, while Soap (Dexter Fletcher) is taking pride in being a small-time cook. The big bad is just a local porn magnate and loan shark Hatchet Harry. He's a scary guy but just a local player, interested in taking over a neighborhood pub, tops. It's played for laughs, but it's a plot point that the two Scouse burglars in the film who are sent to retrieve rare guns from an aging, impoverished patrician couple thinks they're robbing people with nothing, because all they own are old things. That repeated lack of familiarity with the “finer” things in life keeps coming back in different ways.
Established as part of the 1990s independent film scene, Ritchie returned with 2000's Snatch, which featured a bigger budget, a bigger cast of stars (Brad Pitt as an unintelligible, badass Irish traveller is a highlight) and a different focus on the middle class. In terms of blending style with a pinball plot, it's the best of Ritchie's crime films. Turkish (a rare Jason Statham role that doesn't involve hitting someone) is forced by local gangster Brick Top to find a fighter to throw a bout in the illegal bareknuckle circuit. Meanwhile notorious thief Frankie Four Fingers steals an 84/86 karat diamond that quickly ends up being fought over by various jewelers, gangsters and assorted miscreants.
The set up is all of heightened stakes, in part due to the more comfortable income and social strata the film occupies. The diamond is worth a few million, and the pot of the fights is pretty high. Turkish owns a business, rather than being a hustler. Cousin Avi and Doug the Head are successful, if not exorbitantly wealthy, jewelers. Instead of playing a leather jacket-wearing hard man looking out for his son as he did in Lock, Stock, Vinnie Jones appears as a suit-and-tie-clad mercenary, a calm professional of a different class. Part of the film's humor and conflict arises from pitting these yuppie criminals against the aforementioned Irish travelers or would-be, flashy gangsters. But it also examines what happens when those in the middle feel the pressure from those above them. In one of the most surprising scenes Ritchie includes, the otherwise untouchable Brick Top finds himself tripping over his words as he tries to make up for a supposedly fixed fight going sideways. He's talking to some serious looking rich people, unnamed and unmentioned after the fact, but in just a brief moment Ritchie manages to show how money and power outweigh anything a bloodthirsty gangster can do.
The class aspect of Ritchie's films really comes clear in the third film of his “crime trilogy” in 2008's Rocknrolla. Viewed as a whole, Rocknrolla is the missing piece, the upper-class exploration that ties it all together. Here, the game is real estate (and, to a lesser extent, the music business). As financier and real estate fixer Lenny Cole (Tom Wilkinson) repeatedly points out, the brick and mortar business is booming. Some well-off criminals with prison records, the Wild Bunch (Gerard Butler, Tom Hardy, Idris Elba...this film has a stacked cast) want to get into the property game, but can't get the loan. Even if they can't officially get their loans, money talks, and Lenny has the money and high-class favors to corrupt the system in his favor.
Quick aside: This is where the movie gets interesting on another meta level. This was written and filmed before the 2008 Great Recession, and Ritchie rightly points out how inflated the market is, and how people overpricing and finagling pieces to make a sweet profit while creating greater risks. The director didn't predict the crash, but he was clearly aware of the actions that ultimately led to the massive collapse.
But the upper class gets other interesting depictions here. Here the stakes are even higher. The players are bandying about 50 million euros in their efforts to get building permits and rights to lucrative property. Outside of the ruthless Russian oligarch Yuri (Karl Roden, playing Roman Abramovich with the serial numbers filed out), Lenny is the main depiction of the upper class in the movie, and Ritchie doesn't portray him kindly. The rich in this film are selfish, self-serving, and use their bank accounts as bludgeons for power.
Then there's The Gentlemen. It kind of erases the idea of a thematic trilogy, but also as a crime movie stands apart from the others because it's less about one class level and more about the liminal aspect of it. Ritchie explored that slightly in Rocknrolla, with Lenny's rock star stepson Johnny Quid (Toby Kebbell) hanging out with lower-class junkies but also parading his classical education and means around them. Of course, it's also the first crime film Ritchie made in a post Great Recession world, when inequality is at an even greater height. If you've got the money, it's good. The proposed deal for Mickey's empire is in the billions. Mickey owns a pub, is courted and beloved by billionaires and the upper crust, and his wife (Michelle Dockery) oversees a high-end car shop. Rocknrolla's Yuri might rub shoulders with Mickey Pearson, but McCounaghey's drug kingpin is not someone Lenny and the Wild Bunch would be seeing.
Also, for all of the flaws of The Gentlemen, McConaughey shines. It's kind of baffling that he hasn't worked with Ritchie before, considering how well the former's acting works with the latter's script. He's not doing his Rust Cohle thing, but age and more dramatic work helps McConaughey play a breezy, in-control refined man.
On another level, The Gentlemen feels like Ritchie doing his version of Layer Cake. After all, he was originally set to direct the 2004 film from Matthew Vaughn (Ritchie's long-time producing partner). If you haven't seen Layer Cake, do. It's one of the best crime films of the 21st century, and Daniel Craig's turn as the nameless drug dealer trying to get out of the game is seen as the main reason he got the part of James Bond. In it, Craig's XXXX thinks he's got his life together and is about to retire, but gets drawn into a web of manipulation, backstabbing and confusion, dealing with flashy wannabe gangsters and the shady upper crust who have professional security agents rather than thugs. Sound familiar?
The film's name comes from a speech one such rich person (Michael Gambon) says near the end: “You're born, you take shit. You get out in the world, you take more shit. You climb a little higher, you take less shit. Till one day you're up in the rarefied atmosphere and you've forgotten what shit even looks like. Welcome to the layer cake, son.” The film does a great job highlighting class power with bookending scenes at Stoke Park Country Club, where someone who has moved up in society gives the orders.
Like Layer Cake, The Gentlemen touches on a few similar plot points: junkies, heiresses who hang out with junkies, and people trying to retire into a legitimate life. Both films even pay homage to a classic British crime film, The Long Good Friday. Classic London gangster Harold Shand wants to go legitimate with a major property development along the docks. While he fails, in Layer Cake, Gambon's Eddie Temple overlooks that same location, implying that he made it while the would-be up and comer failed. The 1980 film's influence is clear in some ways in The Gentlemen; the iconic ending of Shand being driven off by a bad guy is recreated at the end of The Gentlemen when Mickey is abducted by the henchmen of a Russian oligarch, but again with a disruptive class twist. The Toddlers show up out of nowhere and gun down the Russian mooks while Mickey escapes. And all three films also touch on how upper-class people can ignore lower-class louts who can come back and disrupt their lives, in some ways I won't spoil in full if you haven't seen them.
The Gentlemen is also Ritchie's chance to get autobiographical, at least in a meta sense. Mickey is of course someone who “came up the hard way,” going from small-time drug dealer who would get violent to the head of a drug business that hobnobs with lords and ladies in the United Kingdom. It's not hard to think about Ritchie, although a child of privilege, going from making hard-financed independent films like Lock, Stock to helming blockbusters for some of the biggest studios. And of course, when Mickey has to get his hands dirty again and decides not to retire at the end, it's Ritchie his his avatar trying to remind audiences and other filmmakers that he's still got it when it comes to making crime films.
Now, is Ritchie some grand marxist or the like? Obviously not, and his films are not giant screeds about inequality. He's not even a wannabe Jarvis Cocker. The Gentlemen especially has a few problematic elements on race. However, it does touch on some of the limits and flexibility of the class system, and provides an interesting complement to his original thematic crime trilogy.
The Gentlemen definitely isn't one of the year's best releases, although given how few films we'll see in theaters, it might end up as one via limited options. Ritchie doesn't quite recapture the magic of his past crime films, although he didn't make an outright bad movie. The set up isn't bad, and the actors are clearly having fun. Ritchie can still make some stylish chase sequences and clever montages. But if The Gentlemen is worth watching for any reason, it's in part because Ritchie continues to offer unexpected insight into the stratified social system.
Today's Panic Reading
Given that this is my first post on this strange newsletter journey, I wanted to shoutout to some of the other newsletters that I have loved reading and have inspired me to take the leap into this.
The Long Version: Jonathan M. Katz is a journalist whose work I've greatly admired. In his newsletter The Long Version he tries to offer some context and good historical comparisons to what's happening now in our hellscape of a present. I particularly was struck by “Is This the Beginning of Trump’s Dirty War?” which did a better job articulating how terrifying the current wave of unidentified security forces grabbing people into unmarked cars in Portland is, and how it echoes the Dirty War of Latin America.
Wars of Future Past: If I'm honest, Kelsey Atherton's technology and war-focused newsletter was what really motivated me to start writing Let's Do the Panic Again. Aside from being a genuinely good person, Kelsey is a great journalist with a better grasp of the cyberpunk-esc way our conflicts are evolving, without getting caught up in the latest viral craze. He's also co-host of one of the best podcasts out right now, A People's History of the Old Republic. If you're a Star Wars fan, and I'm sure most of you are, check it out.
A Lonely Impulse of Delight: Connor Wroe Southard’s newsletter was also something I’m using as a guide to my own. He’s been tackling storytelling and narrative with everything from Friday Night Lights to Attack the Block, plus working in commentary on the best comic strip, Calvin & Hobbes. And speaking of podcasts, Connor co-hosts the genre-focused Podside Picnic, which is worth your time. The episode on Jeremy Saunier’s punks vs. Neo Nazis film Green Room is particularly great.
Discourse Blog: I was an avid reader of Splinter until it was killed. The writing style was direct and to the point and the politics were rooted in a reality-based need for leftism and a strong disdain for bullshit. The Splinter team has mostly reunited for Discourse Blog, a fantastic newsletter that if you aren't reading, you should be. The recent “Seriously, Just Give Us the Goddamn Money” article is 100 percent correct.
Today's Music
In keeping with both the Guy Ritchie topic and the class theme, here's a classic cut by The Clash — the only band that matters — used in Rocknrolla.
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