Sexy Beast (2001)
by Michael Julianelle

Forget Gandhi, Sexy Beast is Ben Kingsley's tour de force.

Ray Winstone is Gal Dove, a former gangster who has retired and moved out to the Spanish countryside with his ex-porn star wife. When the film opens, Gal is basking in the sun, soaking up its rays while lounging beside the pool, enjoying time with his friends. Life is good, and he knows it.

But just before his wife Didi (Amanda Redman) drives up, returning from the shops, a boulder rolls down the mountain next to Gal's house, and barely misses him on its way to the bottom of his pool. Gal realizes just how close he came to an absurd death, but doesn't yet know that he won't escape everything quite so easily.

One evening, at dinner at a fancy restaurant, Gal and Didi's close friends Aitch and Jackie arrive, looking particularly glum. It seems Jackie has gotten a phone call from a man named Don Logan, and he is coming to Spain to talk to Gal about a job. Suddenly, everything that was right about the evening has been wiped away, soiled by the intrusion of Gal's past, and the realization of the inevitable conflict that goes hand in hand with dealing with a rabid dog like Logan.

Like an inexorable force of nature, Ben Kingsley's Don Logan steps off a plane, holding his suit jacket by his side and staring straight ahead, firm and focused. His presence is extremely intimidating, and his intensity drains the life out of everyone he deals with as they struggle not to offend him. He is determined to convince Gal, an old colleague, to come in on the complex robbery he's organizing for Teddy Bass (Ian McShane - slick and vicious), a powerful crime lord back in England. Gal is subsequently placed between a rock and a hard place, between the devil and the deep blue sea (themes underscored by debut director Jonathan Glazer's stylish direction), as his constant, low-key refusals of Logan's request are repeatedly ignored by the stubborn psychopath (whom we see conversing with himself while shaving).

Logan is the link back to Gal's old life, a life that, as is made apparent during the film's first few minutes, he does not want back. But Logan won't take no for an answer, and starts terrorizing Gal into accepting his offer. Aside from disparaging Gal's wife and assaulting Gal himself while he sleeps, Logan also insinuates that he wants Jackie, a woman with whom he slept a few years back. Indeed, as they walk on eggshells in attempts to keep Logan from exploding, it is Gal's insistence on that fact - that Logan's real motivation for the trip to Spain is his desire for Jackie - that most infuriates him. And he leaves. But not for good.

Winstone gives a strong, controlled performance, conveying Gal's tense desire to remain subdued and to get Logan out of his life with as little mess as possible, which contrasts nicely with Kingsley's astonishingly forceful and commanding turn as the overbearing thug. Things come to a head between the two after Logan has a run in with airport security, only to return to Gal's house. After some unexpected developments, Gal is off to England to help with the heist.

Throughout the film, Gal is fighting to keep himself together, and to keep his darker, criminal side submerged. That struggle is elucidated in several odd scenes depicting his nightmares, wherein a monstrous creature, which stands like a human but looks like an animal, represents those aspects of himself that he presumably shed when he retired to Spain. But that side of him still lurks, below the surface, and Don Logan's reappearance in his life is a strong reminder of that fact, as is the striking scene that closes the Logan storyline.

The heist is executed in ingenious fashion, involving underwater drilling and a floating bounty, but Gal has trouble playing his part, especially when Teddy Bass gets under his skin and starts to increase the pressure. The question of whether Gal truly has shed his past is answered with an unforgiving sequence in which his reluctance to embrace his old way of life leaves him by the side of the road, without a ride but with his priorities in line.

Jonathan Glazer, formerly a music video and commercial director, does a good job of keeping things fast and colorful. The water that is constantly on screen serves as a counterpoint to the dark side Gal is trying to keep submerged, a dark side personified in Logan, but seemingly existent, in varying degrees, in everyone. While the film can get a bit abstruse, especially when concerning the beast in Gal's dreams, the conditions of the actual robbery, the strength of the two main performances, and Glazer's sure hand at communicating the suffocating fear that comes with Logan's violent intrusion into Gal's new, peaceful and happy life, makes for an intelligent and stylish thriller.

Michael S. Julianelle is a Boston-based freelance writer coping with his nearly debilitating zeal for entertainment and pop-culture.

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