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I’m going to throw a word around that I don’t tend to do much: overrated. I think The Long Good Friday is an overrated British gangster film on the whole, but in the tiny details it does do some unique things and is blessed to have Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren as the leads. When the film begins to get cumbersome, Hoskins and Mirren are there to work tiny miracles and save it.
I think much of the blame for the more lumbering choices in the film land squarely on director John Mackenzie’s shoulders. His indifferent camera work is a problem, but so is the choice to pull focus from Hoskins and Mirren trying to go legit. When we focus in on the character portrait of Harold Shand, Hoskins in his big break role, the film soars, and where we lose interest in when we move away from him and into scenes showing the bombings and killings of his men. This would not normally be a problem if any of these men or these bombings were fully developed. However, these excursions away from the main action frequently interrupt and upset the more compulsive viewing of watching Shand be a smooth operator with the American Mafia or treat street kids tenderly. This man is a mess of contradictions, but these bombings and deaths are of various characters that have only the flimsiest of development before being dispatched. There is not much tension there. (Although the sight of a young Pierce Brosnan feeling his body under a shower-head in a local gym is incredibly attractive image that burnt itself into my brain.)
But we keep returning to Shand and his trophy wife (Mirren). Shand is a man that knows how to be a smooth operator, who rose to the top of the pack not because he’s a compact, muscular fireplug, but because he sees through it all and knows what to say, when to say, and to whom it must be said. And here he is, in an attempt to go legit, helplessly watching his empire crumble while desperately trying, in vain, to remain respectable and maintain the façade of upper-class mobility. He’s always far more interesting than the rest of the film ever threatens to become. Mirren, for her part, isn’t given much to do, but she’s beautiful, elegant, and her very presence here only reinforces the notion that Shand is but a pretender to this glamorous and well-groomed world that he so desires to be a part of. I just wonder what a director like, say, Neil Jordan could have done with this material in the end.
