Donnybrook (2019)

rating: ****

the story: A U.S. army vet goes to extreme lengths to improve life for his family.

review: There's now a lineage of movies from the past decade that needs pointing out: Warrior (2011) to Hell or High Water (2016) to Donnybrook (2019), which will be perhaps the best and easiest way to explain what Donnybrook accomplishes.

Warrior was an MMA movie that was anything but an MMA movie.  It wasn't the MMA version of the traditional Hollywood boxing drama, but rather a movie that featured mixed martial arts but wasn't about mixed martial arts.  It was about the contrasting fortunes of a pair of brothers destined to collide all over again (in or out of the octagon).  It was above all else great filmmaking.  Hell or High Water was a latter-day western, a Great Recession story about a pair of outlaws who were also brothers.  They were both concerned with matters of the modern world we often don't focus on, how easy it is to fall behind when everyone's so focused on the glories of getting ahead.  But the reality is, there's a large percentage of the population that routinely struggles. 

Donnybrook is a powerful, poetic experience.  It maintains a razor focus on its characters.  It features acts of grizzly violence.  Interestingly, the only time director Tim Sutton actually shows the violence is perhaps the worst but also the most routine: when a scene of domestic violence plays out inside of a car.  It's fair to say that most of this is metaphor, that unlike Warrior, which ends up spotlighting the MMA tournament it builds toward, the eponymous backwoods version of that event in Donnybrook is really only glimpsed at the very end.  Where Warrior and Hell or High Water trace a sequence of events, Donnybrook follows its lead characters as they meet their various fates.

It's a movie where the villain has no redeeming qualities.  This is an era that has often put villains in a sort of sympathetic spotlight, but not Donnybrook.  There's never any hope of redemption for Frank Grillo, who had his breakthrough role in Warrior, which led to Captain America: Winter Soldier, where he first inhabited this kind of character.  Grillo's sister is played by Margaret Qualley, who nearly stole Once Upon a Time in Hollywood from much bigger actors.  Between the two performances, she has easily become a personal favorite.  Grillo's counterpoint is Jamie Bell, once an adorable young actor and now turned into grizzled veteran, and perhaps this is his perfect role, the army vet with nowhere to turn but sheer desperation.  James Badge Dale, who seems to have been cast out from Hollywood proper, turns in a typically compelling performance as the only cop who might've been able to intervene in these desperate lives, having firsthand experience as he does.

The whole experience is handled expertly, from how it opens to how the story circles back to that point, and the rich music score that punctuates every moment, knowing exactly when to pivot, as the story itself does.  Apparently what little exposure it has had fixates on the violence, but doesn't seem to understand how little there really is, or what any of it means.  A pity.  But one that shouldn't end up being the final word.