The
Long Good Friday
I recently had a chance to rewatch
one of the great cinematic love stories of our time, The Long Good Friday. I saw this flick when I was a kid and it
greatly helped in defining my expectations for what true love was the same way
that Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior helped me
realize my ideal profession: maniac.
The dynamic between Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren in this film is one of support and understanding, as
well as sacrifice. Helen Mirren’s not physically my type, but she is pretty good
looking in this film if that matters to you.
What does matter is how understanding she is of Bob Hoskins. The two work together running a crime
syndicate and they both understand that business comes before pleasure. Hoskins has the vision and drive and Mirren keeps her eyes on the administrative details and
public relations.
Helen Mirren plays the
world’s best girlfriend in this film.
How many times has your wife come home and got angry because you’re
lying there drunk on the sofa with some empty beer bottles on the floor? Mirren comes home
and finds Hoskins hysterical and covered in blood and the bloke he stabbed to
death with a broken bottle laying on the den floor. But she takes it in stride. She doesn’t nag with the typical exclamation:
“I just vacuumed!”
She also can deal with Hoskins cancelling on her. She doesn’t throw some fit because he has to
work late hanging motherfuckers on meat hooks and
torturing them. Mirren
doesn’t even seem to take very long to get dressed for special occasions. This is one strong lady.
And what’s worse than the restaurant losing your
reservation? How about it exploding as
you drive up to it? But Helen doesn’t
flinch.
Bob is a pretty great guy, too. He’s really intellectual. Aside from his interests in stabbing people
on his yacht, he’s also a history buff, amateur anthropologist, virtuoso
economist, cunning political scientist, and connoisseur of whiskeys and
torture. He likes to share his knowledge
in many frequent sessions of speechification inspired
by knocking back bottles of whiskey.
He teaches people about history by firing shotguns at
them and then elaborating on the great British tradition of blowing motherfuckers away.
He shows his knowledge of international relations by firing shotguns at
some Irish gangsters and screaming that he runs
Bob gets really clever when he starts interweaving
politics and economics. Some Americans
decide they don’t want to invest in his corrupt casino and he tells them that
they just don’t appreciate British culture, which he says has contributed “more
than a hotdog” to the world. Bob knows
all about fine cuisine. At one point he
serves up a buffet table of shotguns and lets his crew make a round and choose
the one that fits their tastes. So yeah,
this guy is super-intellectual and you can see why he runs the biggest crime in
He also fancies himself royalty. He constantly compares his actions and
responsibilities to the monarch, and refers to Helen Mirren
as The Queen (which is strange because Helen Mirren
went on to play both
The couple in this film are having a bad day. It seems that somebody is extracting revenge
on Bob. But he doesn’t know who! It’s not often that you see a revenge movie
from the perspective of the villain. I
mean Payback decided to focus on Mel Gibson wasting every motherfucker
in sight instead of just showing Kris Kristofferson sitting around in his
office wondering why his people weren’t calling him back. Man On Fire
wasn’t just Marc Anthony and Mickey Rourke sharing
drinks and saying “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit!” they stuck to Denzel blowing the shit out of motherfuckers. Frankly, I wouldn’t think that the approach
of showing the guy at the top of the crime syndicate getting taken down would
work if I hadn’t seen this film.
As much as I’ve gone on about how great a lady Helen Mirren is in this movie, she has her faults. It’s obvious she’s not the academic type like
Bob, but she makes some administrative errors, too. At one point a henchman drives Helen home
from the meeting with the American investors.
The henchman offers to see her too her door but on the lift up to her
flat he steps up close and says “I want to lick every inch of you.” I’m not sure he thought this through, because
if you tried to lick a lady’s scalp you’d just get all this hair on your
tongue.
Helen never passes this on to Bob nor files a sexual
harassment complaint. I have to say I
really admire the henchman. Hitting on the boss’s lady.
That takes balls. Maybe it
doesn’t count as sexual harassment if it’s delivered as a statement. There are always technicalities like
that. Maybe it has to be a question or a
command to count as harassment. I’m a
finance guy. Leave that bullshit to the
wizards and shaman in HR.
I don’t know why Helen didn’t report this. Bob’s organization is really
progressive. One of his top executives
is openly gay and Bob is cool with that.
In fact they’re best friends. I’m
glad to see that crime syndicates respect the gay community. Bob even uses his intellectual superpowers to
try and understand how homosexuals think.
When his best friend is stabbed to death Bob hypothesizes that it has
something to do with the friend’s looks fading with age and that Bob’s theory
is that gays take that kind of stuff more personally leading to stab
wounds.
I’m not sure I follow his logic, but maybe being an
aging gay man sometimes leads to stab wounds up and down your back. I don’t watch that House show often
enough to know about these sorts of compound medical conditions.
All and all this movie has lots of personality,
shotguns, romance, and even a demolition derby.
If you liked the way Kill Bill made child custody battles
interesting, then I think you’ll like the way The Long Good Friday
depicts the difficulties of working with your spouse.