‘DONNYBROOK’ HITS THE CANVAS
“Donnybrook” ostensibly is about the world of underground, bare-knuckle brawling that offers the winner a hefty payout for being the last man standing amid a sea of broken bodies. Yet there’s actually little fighting in director Tim Sutton’s artfully directed but self-important downer of a movie that’s meant to be some sort of Grand Statement about life among dispossessed whites in rural, Midwestern America. It’s “Fight Club” meets “Falling Down,” with meth.
Jarhead Earl (Jamie Bell) and Chainsaw Angus (Frank Grillo) are both veterans whose lives have spiraled downward and crossed violently. Angus, along with his sister (Margaret Qualley) with whom he has a twisted, abusive and incestuous relationship, deals drugs and kills people more often than he showers. Earl doesn’t want them anywhere near his wife (Dara Tiller), young son (Alexander Washburn) and daughter (Rhyan Elizabeth Hanavan). Not that Earl is above crime himself, robbing a store and slamming the owner in the face with a gun.
Earl promises his family he’s going to get them out of their grinding poverty by entering a donnybrook being held a couple of days drive away and winning the $100,000 prize. But he can’t shake Angus, who also is on his way there, hungry for vengeance. In turn, Angus has a dirty and emotionally tortured cop (James Badge Dale) on his tail who wants to take him down before he kills again.
Based on the well-received novel by Frank Bill, which some have dubbed “recession noir,” “Donnybrook” is beautifully shot and scored but it’s also mannered, joyless and heavy-handed, with characters who feel less like real humans and more like indieHollywood caricatures who inhabit a fantasy flyover country of hicks, guns, narcotics, beer and inarticulate rage. American carnage, indeed.
Sutton doesn’t even try to get at why his characters feel like such victims with no future beyond duking it out in a grimy cage. Earl tells his daughter that there isn’t much for people like them, while standing in a field where a Civil War battle took place where many soldiers and, apparently, subtlety died.
Still, the performances are strong, with both Bell and the always reliable Grillo (the go-to guy for general kick-butt brutality) throwing themselves into their roles with gut-punch fervor while Qualley has to pull off the movie’s most thankless and disturbing scene, a grotesquerie involving orgasmic sex and sudden, bloody violence.
Such ferocity is evidence that “Donnybrook” is always going for a knockout punch that leaves the audience reeling from the blow. But it’s the one that ends up going down for the count.