David Henninger (Ralph Fiennes) is the sort of affluent British blowhard who’s prone to flaunting his privilege and bluntly announcing his regressive views wherever he goes. And in writer-director John Michael McDonagh’s The Forgiven, that place specifically happens to be Morocco, where David and his wife, Jo (Jessica Chastain), have arrived to attend a lavish weekend party at the gaudy desert estate of a friend, Richard (Matt Smith).
From the moment that we’re introduced to him, David is peevishly throwing around racial slurs and passing judgment on the surrounding Muslim community, much to the exasperation, if not necessarily condemnation, of his wife. Then, after having a few too many and getting behind the wheel of a car to drive out to the remote festivities, he runs down a young Moroccan man, Driss (Omar Ghazaoui), who steps into the road. But since they have a party to get to, David and Jo promptly pack the body up in the trunk and continue on their way.
“Only by dispassionate analysis can we get to the bottom of our inaction,” says a dinner guest in The Exterminating Angel, Luis Buñuel’s claustrophobic horror story about a most surreal class conflict. And as David and Jo finally arrive at the party, McDonagh, adapting Lawrence Osborne’s bestselling 2012 novel, begins a coolly detached moral inquisition that can be traced back to that line, if not exactly to the barbed ethos of the film that contains it.
Treating the mishap as nothing more than an unpleasant inconvenience, Richard helps David to shuttle Driss’s body away to the garage, and the boy’s death is ruled an accident after the police arrive. David, though, is not yet off the hook, as the subsequent arrival of the boy’s father, Abdellah (Ismael Kanater), to claim the body comes with a stern request for David to return with him to his village for the burial ceremony. Apprehensive at venturing outside his white privileged bubble, David responds as one might expect: “But what if they’re ISIS!?”
Meanwhile, the party must go on, and as David begrudgingly sets off on a quest that he has yet to recognize is one for his moral absolution, we become acquainted with the rest of the pompous partygoers. Among them are Richard’s skittish partner, Dally (Caleb Landry Jones), the haughty Lord Swanthorne (Alex Jennings) and his gaggle of young female companions, and a righteous French photojournalist (Marie-Josée Croze). Also floating around on the outskirts is young American financial analyst Tom Day (Christopher Abbott), who immediately begins to shamelessly flirt with Jo in David’s absence, a move that she happily reciprocates.
The Forgiven is gamely performed, but its characters are simply caricatures. As the partygoers lounge around Richard’s estate, drinking and snorting cocaine and pretentiously espousing their views of the Muslim world, they more or less act as a delivery system for the script’s stream of facile bon mots. Meanwhile, the Moroccan wait staff, including the patient and wise Hamid (Mourad Zaoui), bear witness to this display of privilege, offering up poetic commentary among themselves. But because McDonagh keeps them largely confined to the sidelines, whatever satire of white elite society is intended has been blunted by monotony.
The Forgiven still entertains in fits and starts, owing to McDonagh’s knack for gleefully off-color humor. (Tom is asked at one point if he’s gay, to which he quickly retorts, “No, but I fucked a gay man once.”) And, at times, the film recalls his superior Calvary, as both are deliberately stagey springboards for philosophical rumination. But unlike that film’s rigorous exploration of communal guilt and sin enmeshed within a compellingly unique narrative mystery, the eventual forgiving of The Forgiven comes about in disappointingly routine fashion after we intermittently check back in on David’s symbolism-laden pseudo-pilgrimage.
“You will suffer, you’ll see,” David is told early on in The Forgiven by a Moroccan man when he asks how hot the desert is, and that premonition comes through in the film’s overwrought coda, which strains for a profundity that’s only deflated by its telegraphed obviousness. Like most of what comes before it, David’s confrontation of his misdeeds becomes just another glib punchline, only lingering in the mind as long as a morning hangover.
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