“The mind doesn’t want to get it”: the movie Guy Ritchie said you’re too stupid to understand
In the world of cerebral cinema, there are Béla Tarr, Andrei Tarkovsky, Chantal Akerman, and, of course, Guy Ritchie.
No list of cinema’s greatest intellectuals would be complete without the man who gave us a David Beckham cameo in a video-game-inflected King Arthur movie, or at least, that seems to be what the man himself believes.
For those who are blessedly unaware of Ritchie’s work, allow me to disturb the peace. He is the man behind hits like Snatch, Sherlock Holmes (the Robert Downey Jr one), and The Gentlemen. His filmmaking style is a bleak combination of slow-motion action sequences and a heavily-earmarked thesaurus. Cockney slang is forcibly deployed, while women wear nice clothes and twists are broadcast at the beginning of each film and patiently wait until the end to repeat themselves.
Are his movies fun? I have been told in no uncertain terms by Ritchie fans that they are. Do they invite rigorous intellectual investment? I have been informed by my own boredom that they do not.
But the movie where Ritchie really took himself to new stylistic heights was 2005’s Revolver, which stars Jason Statham as a conman and chess savant who beats his boss, played by Ray Liotta, while gambling one night, and needs to be rescued by two mysterious men. Beyond that, who can say? It broadcasts philosophical quotes by way of title cards, it features actual audio of self-help guru Deepak Chopra, and it contains lengthy discussions about the ego and the id.
Roger Ebert called it a movie that was designed to punish its audience for buying tickets, which seems about right, because it leaps around in time, attempts to unlock the human condition with the sophistication and smugness of someone who has read the first paragraph of a Sigmund Freud introduction, and trots out pretentious voice-overs that undercut everything happening onscreen.
According to Ritchie, however, it might just be a little too brilliant for the average mind to comprehend. “You have to understand that your mind does not want to get it,” he said in an interview with Ion Cinema, adding, “I’m sympathetic to that, which is why I am very clear about, ‘Go and see this movie if you are interested in a challenge. Don’t go and see it if you’re not’.”
There weren’t many people who were up for the challenge, apparently, because the movie tanked at the box office. The reviews were so poor that in order to get a quote for the poster, the marketing department had to resort to its own PR material. The Guardian did some sleuthing and discovered that the quote, “Brilliant… Guy Ritchie back to his best!”, was a mash-up of some paid marketing material that appeared in The Sun and a quote from a model who had a minor role in the movie.
In his interview, in which he insists, among other things, that the mind cannot comprehend reality, Ritchie got surprisingly candid. In the end, he explained, the film is “about the ego”, which was a refreshingly honest admission, despite his strange use of the word “the” rather than ‘my’.
