Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Gentlemen
2020 · Guy Ritchie · The Gentlemen on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch Fletcher stop a scene and tell it another way. (structure)
Grant's tabloid fixer is pitching a screenplay to Raymond across two chairs. He interrupts, revises, restages, and admits when he is guessing. The cut obeys him every time.
Payoff: You are not watching what happened. You are watching what a man is selling, and the film shoots his version as if it were fact. In the reading: The forger (le faussaire). The reading calls Fletcher a forger: someone who produces the truth he is telling rather than reporting one.
Notice where the grow rooms sit under the great houses. (staging)
Gemma Jackson puts cannabis bunkers beneath the estates of gentry who have acres and no cash. The lords are upstairs with the roof problem. The tenants downstairs have the money.
Payoff: The set design carries the whole argument. Land-rich and broke sits directly on top of cash-rich and unwelcome. In the reading: Crystal-decomposition. The reading calls this crystal-decomposition: an old ordered world rotting underneath while its surfaces stay immaculate.
Count the whip pans and notice who is talking when they land. (camera)
Alan Stewart's baseline is widescreen, symmetrical, and often still. Men sit in facing chairs and pub booths. The speed ramps and freezes Ritchie made his name on arrive only inside Fletcher's telling.
Payoff: Ritchie gave his old style to a character. The flourishes are Fletcher's taste, which lets the film use them and disown them.
Watch how rarely McConaughey raises his voice. (performance)
Mickey Pearson is played almost entirely in stillness, a quiet space at the center of a loud film. Everyone around him gestures and talks. He sits and waits.
Payoff: The menace is the vacancy. You keep leaning in to read a man who gives you almost nothing to read.
Listen to how close Grant's voice sits in the mix. (sound)
This is a talk picture. Fletcher's wheedling glottal London voice is recorded intimate and kept near your ear, while the pictures he narrates open onto lawns and aerial estates.
Payoff: The mix puts you in the room with the salesman, not in the world he describes. You are being pitched, closely.
Once you have seen it
Watch the pub scene again and count what it actually establishes. (structure)
Mickey orders a pint and a pickled egg, a gun goes off, blood hits the bar. Fletcher wrote it on spec. It is a fully shot ending for something that has not occurred.
Payoff: The film's first image is a lie it filmed anyway. Nothing underneath waits to be recovered, which is the point. In the reading: Falsifying narration. The reading calls this falsifying narration: incompatible versions of one event, each shot with equal conviction.
Track what the Toddlers' raid video does once it circulates. (setting)
Coach's boys hit a grow farm and post the footage as a music promo. No police act on it. The clip's spread is what destabilizes the empire.
Payoff: Guns move very little here. Footage does. Every catastrophe in the film travels as a story someone can publish.
Count who is actually cleaning up after each disaster. (performance)
Nobody's scheme works on its merits. An oligarch's son, an overdose, a triad lieutenant's ambition, all collide by accident. Hunnam's Raymond and Farrell's Coach quietly tidy the results.
Payoff: The film resolves through janitors, not masterminds. The pleasure on offer is competence absorbing chaos.
Look at the aerial shots of the estates in autumn light. (camera)
Stewart shoots the English countryside from above in low raking light, repeatedly, without any character in it. The land gets more unbroken screen time than most of the cast.
Payoff: The film keeps insisting the acreage is the real property in play. Everyone else is negotiating over who gets to stand on it.
Carry this in: Every time an image flatters someone, ask who is pitching it. Fletcher is selling most of what you see.