Three stars. Rated R, for nudity, sexual content, violence, drug use and pervasive profanity
By Derrick Bang
We’ve recently been blessed with
a couple of show-stopping soliloquies.
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| Fresh out of prison, Dom (Jude Law, left) cheerfully follows longtime friend and criminal colleague Dickie (Richard E. Grant) on a trip to the South of France, where Dom fully expects to be rewarded — very generously — for keeping his mouth shut during a 12-year stretch. |
Matthew McConaughey’s coked-out
stock-whisperer scene, as he describes the concept behind fugazi to a
still-naïve Leonardo DiCaprio, is by far the best part of the otherwise bloated
Wolf of Wall Street. It’s acting
genius on McConaughey’s part; he’s positively electrifying.
The same can be said of Jude
Law’s opening monologue in Dom Hemingway,
as he waxes rhapsodic about the most cherished part of his male anatomy. It’s a
jaw-dropping introduction to this film’s title character, with Law going on an on and on, never pausing for breath, in
a single dynamite take for cinematographer Giles Nuttgens, who just lets the
camera roll. Law builds to a ferocity that would have riveted 16th century,
standing-room patrons at the Globe Theatre ... although, it must be admitted,
the profanity present in this lust-laden oration would have scorched the earth
for miles around.
Law builds to a furious,
fulminating, saliva-laden climax — in more ways than one — and leaves us
utterly breathless.
I’d love to say the rest of
writer/director Richard Shepard’s film lives up to this prologue. Sadly, not
the case.
Although he’d been busy for well
over a decade earlier, Shepard came to everybody’s attention with 2005’s The Matador, a marvelously stylish crime
noir comedy. Shepard’s cheeky script
notwithstanding, that film got much of its juice from the way star Pierce Brosnan
— normally regarded as refined, genteel and immaculately turned out — went down
and dirty as a world-weary assassin for hire.
Brosnan’s scruffy stomp through a
hotel lobby, clad only in his skivvies, may have been that year’s best single
movie scene.
Shepard clearly tries for the
same vibe with Dom Hemingway, but his
unfocused script can’t settle on a particular mood. Although the narrative
could be considered a journey toward redemption by a career criminal who
regards himself as the world’s best safe-cracker, the tone shifts wildly from
real-world tension and lethal danger, to family melodrama, and even the
heightened fantasyland of magic realism.
