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Cockney Criminals

In "Sexy Beast," filmmaker Jonathan Glazer
breaks every rule of the gangster film genre.

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NAOMI PFEFFERMAN

Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles

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C

inema, synagogue, what's the difference?" breezily
quips director Jonathan Glazer. "You get fairly
dominant Jewish personalities in both."
The British director appears to be one of those
personalities, at least on the cinema front. Like directors
Spike Jonze and David Fincher, the music-video veteran has
stunned critics with his feature film debut, Sexy Beast,
which opens today in metro Detroit exclusively at the Main
Art Theatre in Royal Oak.

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Farmington Hills

Right:
Filmmaker Jonathan
Glazer: "The audience
is lulled into thinking
they're watching a
frothy romp, then they
get something darken"

(248) 553-4220

The dark comedy, written by
Louis Mellis and David Scinto,
begins as Gal (Ray Winstone), a
Cockney ex-gangster, lolls by the
pool of the pad he shares with his
ex-porn-star wife (Amanda
Redman) in the south of Spain.
Winstone is forced out of his blissful retirement when a
blast from his past arrivet in the form of Don Logan (Ben
Kingsley), a foul- mouthed psychopath out to recruit Gal
for one last heist.
Glazer says he turned down glossier Hollywood projects to
make the modest pic: "The reason I did it, to be honest, is
because I felt I didn't know how to work with actors," he says.
For him, the story had its charms — especially, the char-
acter of Logan. "He's such a wonderfully childlike villain,"
Glazer says. "He absolutely seduced me.
"I hate him, but . I also sort of-want to give him a hug.
He's like all of us who leave the playground and find the
real world to be a scary place. He handles that by pretend-
ing he's still on the playground — and trying to drag every-
one back there with him."
Glazer, now 35, spent his playground years at a Jewish day
school and a Reform synagogue. At his home in North

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61135 Orchard Lake Rd., West Bloomfield, MI 48322

(at Id Orchard NI, Fanner Jack Center)

(248) 828-8111

Michael Elkin is entertainment editor of the Jewish Exponent
in Philadelphia.

London, bookshelves sagged with film volumes, and his
father, a magazine designer, talked nonstop about the movies.
Small wonder that young Jonathan became obsessed with
cinema and began directing videos for friends' bands while
still in his teens.
By the late 1990s, he was directing cutting-edge commer-
cials and winning MTV awards for his edgy work with
alternative bands like Jamiroquai and Radiohead.
Glazer doesn't particularly like gangster films, but then
again, Sexy Beast breaks every rule of the genre. "The audi-
ence is lulled into thinking they're watching a frothy romp,
then they get something darker," he says.
Sexy Beast is British slang for "hunk," but Glazer means
the title to refer to the duality of his characters. "Everyone
in the film is both alluring and repellent," he says.
No one more so than Logan, the psychopath, who proved
almost impossible to cast. After seemingly endless auditions,
a producer suggested Kingsley, Glazer initially refused.
"I thought, 'Ben plays these
earnest, noble characters,"' he
Lefi: Ben Kingsley as
says. "This is not gonna happen."
Don Logan, a retired
He changed his mind two min-
British mobster out to
utes into Kingsley's audition,
pull off one last heist:
when, he recalls, "Ben managed
"Ben managed to make
to make profanity sound like
profanity sound like
Shakespeare."
Shakespeare,"
Indeed; the screenplay sports
says Glazer.
obscenities that
would make Quentin
Tarantino blush —
but the actors weren't
allowed to change a
single four-letter
word. "There was a
precision to the script
that denied any kind
of improvisation,"
Glazer says.
Nevertheless, the
director is harshly
critical of his feature
debut.
"The couple of
times I managed to sit
through it with an
audience wasn't easy,"
he says. "I kept think-
ing, 'Oh, God, look at
that' ... I felt it was a fraction of what I wanted to accomplish."
Looking back, Glazer, who is known for his visual
pyrotechnics, views Sexy Beast as an exercise in restraint. "I
had to remember that the brutality is in the words, not the
.
action," he says. ❑

Sexy Beast, rated R, opens today at Royal Oak's Main
Art Theatre. (248) 542-0180.

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