An ugly subtext
The Gentlemen looks slick, but dresses up anti-semitism
If you were choosing a canary in a coal mine to warn you about ascendant anti-semitism in America, the entertainment industry might not be high on your list of candidates. Hollywood loves turning anti-semites into villains, whether Charlie Chaplin and Taika Waititi are turning Adolf Hitler into cartoons, Quentin Tarantino is barbecuing Nazis in a movie theatre or Steven Spielberg and Guillermo del Toro are delivering supernatural smackdowns to evildoers determined to establish a Fourth Reich. Movies and television provide a comforting fantasy where the Holocaust and other anti-jewish acts are continually avenged; the rising toll of anti-semitic hate crimes and harassment is the reality. But it’s this status as a kind of safe harbour that makes Guy Ritchie’s stylish crime caper, The Gentlemen, such a disturbing indicator.
The Gentlemen stars Matthew Mcconaughey as Mickey Pearson, a marijuana grower and distributor, as he tries to sell his operation to Matthew (Succession star Jeremy Strong). Understandably, off-loading a massive drug empire is not without its complications, among them: rival Chinese buyers, including Dry Eye (Henry Golding of Crazy Rich Asians) and Lord George (Tom Wu); a group of street-fighting teenagers led by Coach (Colin Farrell); a family of Russian oligarchs and a heroin-addicted aristocratic teenager; a grumpy newspaper editor (Eddie Marsan); and a rascally private eye named Fletcher (a delightful Hugh Grant).
But underneath all of the great men’s tailoring and banter, something ugly is happening.
Matthew is Jewish, which for the purposes of The Gentlemen appears to mean that he is good with money and is devious to the point of unscrupulousness about his business affairs. “Trust this Jew about that Jew,” Mickey’s wife, Rosalind (Michelle Dockery), warns him when the two men commence talks, a scene that seems to exist mostly to inoculate The Gentlemen against charges of anti-semitism by suggesting that there are Jews on both sides of the conflict.
Matthew is not merely a tough negotiator; in the grand tradition of anti-semitic tropes, he’s cheap and a cheat. The result is a plot in which Jewish and Chinese people are ganging up on white men who are working class in their origins, using — among other people — young black men as their instruments.
Ritchie has a tendency to get diverted from deeper meaning by snazzy suiting and surface cleverness, as in a scene in The Gentlemen where two characters debate whether an insult actually counts as a slur. That’s never truer than in the movie’s final scene. In Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, the Jewish moneylender Shylock’s requirement of a pound of flesh for a debt is presented as macabre and unreasonable.
The Gentlemen inverts Shylock’s demand when, as retribution for Dry Eye’s attempted rape of Rosalind, Mickey insists that Matthew not only make him whole for his business losses financially but that Matthew excise a pound of his own flesh. Unlike Shylock’s pursuit of his payment, The Gentlemen treats Mickey’s brutality as reasonable, even chivalrous. This isn’t just a double standard: The Gentlemen takes an act that marks a Jewish character as monstrous in Shakespeare and flips it around, suggesting that another Jewish character deserves to be forced to mutilate himself.
Guy Ritchie’s talent is for making things look cool. It’s too bad the thing that he’s dressed up this time is anti-semitism.