78 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY3, 2020
Guy Ritchie’s film is not quite a mystery, or an action flick, or a comedy.
THE CURRENT CINEMA
CLASS TRIP
“ The Gentlemen” and “Color Out of Space.”
BY ANTHONY LANE
ILLUSTRATION BY ILYA MILSTEIN
I
t’s an old story. A smart American,
blessed with ambition and style, finds
a sweet slot in the upper reaches of the
British class system. Think of Fred As-
taire’s sister and dance partner, Adele,
who married a son of the Duke of Dev-
onshire, in 1932, and became Lady Cav-
endish. (Her husband died of drink.)
As for Meghan Markle, she aimed
higher still and hit a prince, though the
pleasure seems to have palled; in regard
to the Royal Family, she and her spouse
apparently wanted to be half in, half
out, a position that is no more popular
with constitutional experts than it is
with midwives.
Now we have Mickey Pearson (Mat-
thew McConaughey), the drawling hero
of “The Gentlemen,” which is written
and directed by Guy Ritchie. Mickey
has risen from humble stock to the ram-
parts of wealth, having lost every grain
of humility along the way. We learn
that he came to England as a Rhodes
Scholar; that he sold drugs to the idle
youths of Oxford; and that he then
graduated to the major league, cultivat-
ing cannabis on vast underground farms,
on land owned by English noblemen—
who, needless to say, are desperate for
cash, being far poorer than Mickey him-
self. He may dress like a countryman
of yore, in flat caps and tweed jackets
the color of marmalade, and we first see
him ordering “a pint and a pickled egg”
in a pub, but don’t be fooled. His busi-
ness, should you wish to acquire it, can
be yours for four hundred million
pounds. Meghan Markle married into
the wrong family.
The bulk of the film is told in flash-
back by Fletcher (Hugh Grant), a pri-
vate investigator, who has dug into
Mickey’s past and plans to present his
findings to Big Dave (Eddie Marsan),
the editor of the Daily Print. (Is that
really the best title for a newspaper that
Ritchie could dream up?) However, as
Fletcher explains to Raymond (Char-
lie Hunnam), Mickey’s fixer, he will, for
a small fee, keep the dirt to himself
rather than pass it on to Big Dave.
“Small” means twenty million pounds.
But Mickey is too busy to be black-
mailed. He has two potential buyers
sniffing around: an American named
Matthew ( Jeremy Strong) and a dap-
per Chinese gangster called Dry Eye
(Henry Golding). But which of them
to trust? Maybe neither?
“The Gentlemen” is a mongrel of a
movie. There are not enough twists and
tangles for a proper mystery, not enough
thrills for an action flick, and not enough
laughs for a comedy, though I did enjoy
the sight of Fletcher jumping over low
hedges like a little boy. So what is Ritchie
up to? Indulging an odd but selective
obsession with the strata of British so-
ciety, I’d say, delighting in the lofty and
the lowly, and not bothering with the
folks in between. (For a subtler journey
through such gradations, I recommend
“The League of Gentlemen,” a British
caper from 1960, about a gang of ex-sol-
diers, of varying ranks, who perpetrate
a heist; in the opening shot, one of them
emerges from a manhole, clad in a tux-
edo, and gets into a Rolls-Royce.) “The
Gentlemen” leaps from rolling rural es-
tates to South London projects—nei-
ther location, to be honest, is particu-
larly convincing—and reaches its apogee
in Laura (Eliot Sumner), a lord’s daugh-
ter, whose blue blood is tinctured with
heroin, and who has to be rescued from
a nest of junkies.
To examine a bunch of stills from
“The Gentlemen” would be like leafing
through a menswear catalogue. The
autumn collection, I fancy. Yet a gen-
uine seediness spills from the edges of
the plot. A typical conversation runs
like this: “What am I guilty of ?” “Being
a cunt.” People snicker at an Asian guy
named Phuc—isn’t that genius?—and
Fletcher even tries out his old-school
impersonation of Oriental speech. Mat-
thew, a billionaire, is referred to as “the
Jew.” Grimmest of all is a head-to-head
in a gym. One man calls another “You
black cunt,” whereupon the two of them
stand there and discuss the phrase,
weighing up exactly how racist it is.
Ritchie, no doubt, would argue that
these are fictional figures talking, and
that he is merely representing regular
chaffing and chat. (In one respect, he’s
right. In Britain, unlike in America, the
C-word is commonly and lavishly traded
between men as a term of genial mock-
ery.) But make no mistake, “The Gen-
tlemen” is a nasty piece of work, topped
off with a layer of homophobia; the
more camp your character, the more
