Guy Ritchie‘s “In the Grey” offers what fans expect from the director: relentless but nimble editing; breathtaking locations (Spain, Saudi Arabia, the Canary Islands); clothes, shoes, and hair to die for; the self-mocking machismo and playful insults of male bonding; and a character’s verbal summary of a plan intercut with shots of actions being performed.
This one is about experienced, highly trained experts who live in the grey area between legality and criminality and have no illusions about themselves. Most of all, though—and this is the surprising part—it’s the story of a mother and her two sons doing whatever it takes to protect one another. The mom is ten years younger than the boys. But we’ll get to that.
The aforementioned narrator is Rachel (Eiza González), whose job is recovering money from people who aren’t supposed to have it. The plot kicks in when she visits a New York banking executive named Bobby (Rosamund Pike), whose employer is trying to recover a billion dollars it loaned to Manny Salazar (Carlos Bardem), a criminal dictator. Rachel says she’ll get the billion back for a commission: twenty percent. This sets up another of Ritchie’s tales of men (and a few women) who crash into each other like billiard balls and spin away in unexpected directions.
Rachel is tight with a mercenary commando squad led by Sid and Bronco (Henry Cavill and Jake Gyllenhaal) that powers its way through a series of challenges unveiled like levels in a super-swanky video game. There’s a clever heist, several close-quarters firefights, a car-and-motorbike chase on narrow, winding streets, and a high-stakes extraction that requires ingenuity and tons of gear (ziplines, landmines, tire-deflating “stinger” ropes).
Gyllenhaal, Cavill, and González have worked with Ritchie more than once. They settle into this world with the ease that certain actors from earlier eras brought to war films and Westerns. Sid, Bronco, and their men are professionals to the marrow. They aren’t scared of anything because a few of the foes they encounter have their level of training. They move like leopards on a hunt. Both are in great shape, but not ostentatiously so. Cavill has the compact silhouette of someone who’s done manual labor for most of his life (like Charles Bronson in “Hard Times”), while Gyllenhaal has the sinewy frame and seen-in-all look of a big city bicycle courier who rides six days a week and treats red lights and stop signs as suggestions.
The movie is credible as an international money chase by people who treat violence as one tool in their kit, along with court injunctions and asset forfeitures. But at the same time, somehow, it’s also a rollicking “Look ma, no hands!” action picture, in the vein of the “Mission: Impossible” series and Ritchie’s glamorously frothy “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” How the movie manages to exist in both modes without one neutralizing the other is a puzzle for scholars to solve.
The clothes, by Loulou Bontemps (sounds like a Guy Ritchie character), are a show in themselves. Not only does Bontemps bless her leading lady with knockout ensembles, including a “fearsome businesswoman” combo with jacket, dress, purse, and lipstick in gradations of rose and plum, and a creamy white Florence of Arabia desert outfit with a sheer cape that billows in the wind, she blesses even marginal characters with a signature look. Notice, for instance, Horowitz’s unique sartorial aesthetic, something along the lines of “college professor tangled up with kidnappers in a Coen brothers movie.” In one scene, Horowitz is so afraid of displeasing Salazar that he sweats profusely and has to mop his brow. Not a drop falls on his white seersucker shirt and pale yellow pashmina.
Oh, yeah, right—the plot. It’s unusually dense for a movie of this type. Many of the details, particularly regarding how people hide money and others find it anyway and force its release, feel authoritative. The tale unfolds simultaneously in boardrooms and combat zones. Ritchie throws fistfuls of text onto the screen to establish character names, locations, job titles, equipment lists, and even the ingredients of a cocktail. The movie is edited within an inch of its life by Martin Walsh—who has cut 50 features, including “Chicago” and the current “The Sheep Detectives“—and Jim Weedon, who only edited shorts prior to this but is clearly going places. There’s a continuous flow of information that has to be juxtaposed with the violence, but you’re rarely confused. It’s all laid out like clothes on a bed.
Another quietly impressive element is the relationship between Rachel, Sid, and Bronco. The movie sums up the trio’s origin story in a one-shot flashback: apparently, the guys were in jail somewhere, bound for death, until Rachel intervened and secured their release. This presumably moved the gents to pledge eternal loyalty to the woman who saved them. But we can only infer that. It’s not handed to us.
Also intriguing: Sid and Bronco are a couple, perhaps. It’s impossible to say what kind, but there’s more going on than standard-issue he-man bonding. Notice that casual intimacy is their default whenever they ride together on missions—Bronco doing most of the talking. Also the way Bronco addresses Sid right before hell breaks loose: like he’s worried this will be the last time he sees Sid alive.
As Sid is leaving Bronco alone in their truck to pull off a distraction—getting the attention of two street cops by pretending to be a tourist so drunk that he pees on a wall—Bronco calls after him, “I love you,” and Sid glances back in wordless affirmation. The moment is funny, but it’s not treated as a joke. An in-joke, maybe. There are so many moments in a similar vein that you may be reminded that Gyllenhaal was in “Brokeback Mountain,” playing the talky, sensitive one opposite Heath Ledger’s closeted stoic.
There were great Old Hollywood directors who specialized in these sorts of movies. The best was Howard Hawks, who did “Bringing Up Baby,” “His Girl Friday,” and “To Have and Have Not,” among many endearingly laid-back films in which the main characters have deep affection for each other but express it mostly through action. As an Entertainment Weekly roundup of great directors once put it, “[Hawks’] hallmarks are more thematic than visual: men who adhere to an understated code of manliness; women who like to yank the rug from under those men’s feet; a mistrust of pomposity; a love of sly, leg-pulling wit.”
Ritchie and Steven Soderbergh might be the only major filmmakers left who share Hawks’s belief that not only can entertainment be art, it has a better shot at being received as both if the makers don’t think in those terms.
