Ali Catterall
Underworld assassin Jon (Howard) is in thrall to his frightening, and frighteningly erudite employer, the Machiavellian 'Tattooed Man' (Calder), who demands nothing from his protégé but unquestioning loyalty in return for his generosity.But when a chance meeting with old school friend Andy (Tiernan) and his wife Cathy (O'Rawe) creates a rift between the pair, Jon must decide whether to continue in his brutal way of life or learn to "Accentuate the positive", redeeming his soul in the process.Ostensibly a story charting the relationship between a trainee demon and his Luciferian master, Mr In-Between suffered from one of the most unexpected distribution mishaps: it was originally screened at 2001's Toronto Film Festival, just in time for September 11.As with Paul Tickell's Christy Malry's Own Double Entry, scheduled for release around the same period, such dark and uncompromising material had a hard time finding favour among potential backers, until a comfortable two years had passed. As long-time Atom Egoyan collaborator director Paul Sarossy says, "Mr In-Between is definitely a challenging film. The comfortable resolution of Hollywood films, where the hero gets the 'maiden' and the bad guy gets his just desserts: that doesn't happen in this movie." The trouble is, in attempting to shoehorn novelist Neil Cross's existential meditation on free will into a more palatable British crime flick, Mr In-Between's makers have produced a bit of a mess. Much, it must be said, like Cross's source novel, but that at least had its odd moments of brilliance.Sadly, this film adaptation contains nothing of the sort. Though admittedly possessing an admirably arch (if overly self-conscious) gallows humour, one suspects dialogue exchanges like, "Killing's a useful form of social Darwinism", or "I feel like a drink", "Where do you fancy?" "Oblivion", are actually meant to be taken with the utmost seriousness. The sledgehammer symbolism (much hand-washing abounds) also begins to annoy pretty quickly.
phiggins
SPOILERS. You have been warned. In recent years the gangster genre has taken a sound beating at the hands of all manner of uncivilized thugs. We've suffered through Guy Ritchie's nauseating cockernee vodka-ad rubbish, the endless run of post-Tarantino disasters and the depressing glut of low-budget no-hoper efforts from the British school of blokes in suits shooting each other. We've gone from The Godfather via Reservoir Dogs to Two Days in the Valley and Snatch. But something interesting has been happening elsewhere, and it is slowly infecting the movies with its own potent mythology. Jake Arnott's recent novel, The Long Firm is already seen as a classic of its kind. Full of great British characteristics like deceit, violence, robbery, snobbery and buggery, it didn't reinvent the genre but it did give it a hit of much needed vitality. The Long Firm took for granted the idea that gangsters are in it for more than just the money. All that hanging around with guys in a big guys-only gang has its appeals to certain members of society. The homosexuality of violent men was suddenly not the subtext, but the text itself. It wasn't long before Arnott's aesthetic was seeping into films, investing Gangster No. 1 with a seedy eroticism that added a new twist to some old ideas about male violence. That film took the British gangster genre to a very interesting place (and it's important that this is a British trend – the US gangster is still obsessed with talking cool and shooting straight). But a new film that blasted into our cinemas recently goes further, raising questions not just of sexuality, but of religion, redemption, corruption, morality, and the very meaning of life in a 'civilized' society. That sounds like more weight than any low-budget Brit-flick can bear, and it probably is, but the makers of Mr Inbetween are at least out there, giving it their best shot. Neil Cross's original novel was not exactly brilliant, packed as it was with grammatical errors, pretension and rather tedious action. But it's often the worst books that make the best movies, and so it proves here, for Mr Inbetween is a very fine movie indeed. It offers a world view that is pessimistic yet somehow humane; where violent men are violent because they live in a violent world. It's not much of an excuse for kicking the s**t out of people for a living, and if any of these characters really existed you'd run a mile to avoid them, but in the world of film it makes a certain sense. Part of the appeal of movies is in watching lives that you could never actually live, and would not want to. Violence as an answer to life's problems is a dead-end. You beat someone up, and someone somewhere wants to beat you up. Eventually you spend all your time beating people up or being beaten up by people. Movies offer us a glimpse of a world where the rules are different, and the best movies make that world come thrillingly alive. Mr Inbetween tells the story of Andrew, a man who kicks the s**t out of people for a living. At the start of the film he's just kicked the s**t out of some geezer. Then he bumps into an old school friend who looks on him, even years later, with awe. The old school friend is down on his luck, paying for a round with a pocket full of pennies, and our hero takes pity on him, and wangles him a job in one of those gangster garages that gangsters always seem to have. In a perfect inversion of the real world, Andrew envies his old friend his life, his wife, his child, his domestic bliss. While we're thrilling to the unruly life of violent crime, the violent man just wants to settle down and watch the telly and dunk his digestive in a mug of sweet tea. But of course this is a crime thriller, and nothing can be that simple. The old friend is overwhelmed by Andrew's generosity, his wife is pretty grateful too, and it's not too long before she's running her fingers over Andrew's copious scar tissue. Meanwhile, Andrew's boss (The Tattooed Man), who appears to live in some bizarre underground hangar last seen in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, is cooking and discussing philosophy. There are people who need to be dealt with. Andrew and his mate, the affable driver who's always putting inappropriate songs on the car stereo ('Sorry! Sorry!') arrive at some kind of mansion/castle/stately home in the middle of the night. The Tattooed Man and his two (male) associates greet Andrew with real delight (one of them kisses him full on the lips). Terrible things happen in an upstairs room. Of course, this is not the last we will see of these sinister associates and this upstairs room. For, in true gangster movie fashion, our hero starts to long for all the things he hasn't got, and we know it's only a matter of time before he will find himself in that upstairs room, facing these three sinister (and frankly quite terrifying) men. It's not over yet, though, not by a long way. The good will suffer, the bad will attempt to redeem themselves, the evil will win. If Mr Inbetween is not entirely unpredictable then the fault probably lies as much with the genre as with the film itself. One last job. Cop about to retire. Bad man trying to go straight. Heist goes wrong. How many things can you do with this stuff? What sets a few films above the dross is not so much what they do as what they do not do. Mr Inbetween does not wallow in violence. It does not give in to cliché or caricature. It does not provide cheap laughs or cheap shocks. It does not make much money at the box office.
Daniel Clark
I saw Mr. In-Between at the Toronto International Film Festival. You would expect that it would be impossible to remember any one movie of the 47 I saw at the film festival. The movie made an immediate impression, and one that stuck throughout the festival.I rated every movie I saw and wrote a review in my program. I gave this a 10 as soon as I saw it, the only 10 I gave at the film festival. This is an uncompromising movie. It is beautifully shot and takes chances. Most of all it is true. When the ending occurs, one that is totally unexpected as a movie-goer, you have to go YES, that is EXACTLY what this character would do.It was brilliant. A fantastic character study, with a great story, and it turns the mobster/hitman genre on its ear. Fantastic. I loved. See it! But be prepared to be shocked and challenged.Director Paul Sarossy worked for years with Atom Egoyan, no surprise. He has learned a lot from Egoyan, encompassed all his strengths and avoided his tendency for oblique minutae. Just the right hit of minimalistic flavour mixed with pulsing colour. You will NEVER be bored.
