What to Think About Sexy Beast: A Dialogue

WTTAA: I watched Sexy Beast in 2004, during my freshman year of college, when I was lonely and didn’t have enough stuff to do during the day. (I have different problems now!) My spouse and I were talking about doing another movie dialogue, after enjoying Citizen Kane, and I’d just seen that Sexy Beast was streaming on one of our platforms. It’s a bit of a “cult film” - a movie with a reputation that grows through memory and cultural reference, even though critics and audiences didn’t love it when it came out and you rarely see it included in best-of lists. As I describe below, I remembered very particular elements of it, although it seems to have taken 17 years, a re-watch, and several pages of brainstorming for me to really get the point.

Spouse: Before we get into it I think we should do a plot synopsis.

Ok.

The protagonist of Sexy Beast (who may be the titular or a titular sexy beast, but we’ll get into that) is an aging ex-criminal, Gal Dove. Gal has retired to a gorgeous Spanish villa with a pool and a pool boy and just wants to live his life and make love to his wife and eat calamari and hang out with his friends Aitch and Jackie.

Along comes a wrecking ball of a dude, Don Logan, who is determined to bring him back to London to do a job for an ice-cold crime boss, Teddy Bass. Classic Heist Movie premise!

Retired guy says no, wrecking ball dude insists, retired guy and his friends kill wrecking ball dude. So Gal ends up having to go back to London because he needs to lie to ice-cold crime boss Teddy about the killing so that Teddu doesn’t retaliate by killing said loved ones.

He goes to London, he does the job, which is a bank heist involving tunnelling through the wall of a steam bath, and for The Heist of a Heist Movie, it receives very little screen time. Teddy scares the shit out of Gal, totally knows Gal killed Don, lets Gal go because (he says) he doesn’t care. (About which part? Unclear.)

Let’s get into it!

Yeah that was it. So to start with, this is a funny movie.  As I told you while we were watching, I think that the me who watched this movie 17 years ago did not realize how funny it was.  I think I totally missed the sheer ridiculousness of it.  But this is still a movie that stood out in my memory.  So I’m eager to know -

1. What stood out to you as being particularly memorable, and

2.What do you think stood out in my memory, from when I was 18 years old.

(1) That opening sequence was incredibly funny. This is a great example of a film that has no jokes written into the script but in which the camera makes jokes constantly with cuts and juxtapositions and that kind of thing (very imprecise language, I know) - the way the boulder appears in the background behind clueless sunbather dude (about whom we know nothing at this point), and later, the cutaway to that same boulder when people start asking where Don is. It just strikes me as a movie that does not waste a single frame, and honestly thinking about it makes me want to watch it again. It makes me just want to watch everything Ian McShane has ever made, among other things. Also, the fact that Ben Kingsley imprinted on me as Gandhi when I was twelve makes him doubly hilarious in this movie. He’s menacing, but just wild-eyed enough to make you think he’s kind of making it up as he goes along. And again, the camera is always letting us know by the way it lingers on his face as his eyes nervously dart around that he’s not as dangerous as he thinks he is.

(2) Something to do with boobs?

Not really, but one thing that stood out to me nearly the most was the absence of boobs.  When I was 18, coming out of a sheltered existence at my Benedictine monastery high school, I couldn’t wrap my head around the orgy scene.

Weirdly I had completely forgotten that scene but I am glad you reminded me because it too was very very funny.

Now, I call it an orgy scene, and it seems to take place at an orgy, but really what I mean is the sequence where Teddy, Ian McShane, is talking to a woman, and she introduces him to a man.  Teddy chats with the man suggestively, and the next thing we see is Teddy in the throes of sex, but it’s a closeup of his face and the rest is left to your imagination.

I clearly remember, being 18 years old in 2004, watching that scene and this was my thought process:

Did Teddy just have sex with that guy?  No, no, he was having sex with the woman.  No, it must’ve been the man, that’s what the man meant by “definitely.” So who was on top?  It must’ve been Teddy on top, he’s a powerful gangster guy.  Then again, he’s on his knees, it looks like he’s getting pounded.  But what--he’s letting the guy bang him in the ass?  Is the job really worth that much to Teddy, he’s going to let himself get fucked that way, in the hopes it leads to some kind of robbery opportunity?  Or does he just like that?

God now I really need to watch it again.

In sum, I really had issues with homophobia.  And I think maybe I was the right audience for that, because I think you were supposed to be surprised by it.  But probably because times have changed, and maybe also because I’ve grown up, that scene plays very differently now.

Teddy was pretty sexually ambiguous to me, and I liked that about his character. Ian McShane does that very well. That scene where he’s walking down the street (the one we see twice, and the second time our attention is drawn to the steam bath) I just love the way he walks with a slight sway, the way the camera closes in tight on his face, and that expression. You really can’t take your eyes off him, in part because you’re supposed to be looking for cues as to what he’s doing - what scheme is he pulling, putting that empty cigarette carton in the safe deposit box? What does he know that we don’t? TELL US, TEDDY. WE KNOW THIS HAS SOMETHING TO DO WITH THE BOULDER, BUT HOW? 

Give all the awards to Ian McShane’s eyebrows.

Did you remember much about the plot, or did you find it suspenseful to watch this time around? 

I remembered the whole plot.  It was very striking to me that so much of the movie was not about the heist at all, it was about the crew assembly.  I mean, specifically it’s about Ben Kingsley as Don Logan just terrorizing everybody.  (Clearly I had not seen the trailer. I had read reviews when it came out and I knew Ben Kingsley was really good in it. But I had not seen Ghandi, and Sexy Beast was just one of a bunch of movies that had been pirated onto a college server.) That’s the thing I remember more than anything else, was just the oppressiveness of Don Logan as a character, the pervasive awfulness of his presence.  And I do think that’s how this movie is widely remembered, is for his individual performance. (Perhaps also because that’s how it was sold.)

Now, particularly after having seen the Rick and Morty episode that deconstructs and mocks the heist film genre, I see that that’s what this is - it’s a deconstructionist heist film, where the heist itself is like three minutes of mild amusement and everything goes perfectly, and the plot of the movie is really about a crew assembly gone wrong.

I do agree that Ian McShane is amazing in it.  Another thing I doubt I observed first time around is how great a foil he is against Ray Winstone, Gal Dove.  Gal Dove is comically perfect as a past-his-prime gangster playboy - sort of like if Ray Liotta’s character in Goodfellas had never gotten caught and decided to retire to Nevada at age 47.  But that means Gal Dove is also, really, a hedonist, ambitionless lout of a person.  You only kind of sympathize with him because the movie takes his point of view and he’s clearly less evil than Don or Teddy.  (Sidebar: what is “Aitch?”  A roommate?  A houseguest?)  The focused intensity of first Don Logan and then Teddy Bass makes a really great contrast and enhances the character buildup.

Yeah - why should we feel bad that Gal doesn’t get to enjoy his Spanish retirement? The world does not owe him anything. Again, I return to that opening sequence - there is nothing reverent about his depiction at all. I’m not even exactly sure why it MUST be him - it’s not like he’s Vin Diesel in however many of the Fast and the Furious movies where Vin Diesel has to be coaxed out of retirement. He’s kind of a layabout, and is his relationship with the pool boy on the up and up? Who’s to say? He and his wife go to nice restaurants, he likes calamari, he seems like maybe if he saw a throw pillow with a cute saying on it he would buy it for his living room. 

For the casual reader: that was a sick burn.  We’ve been married long enough to agree without having to say so, but I will brag about our marriage for a minute.  That was a very harsh and true criticism of a person.  If you disagree, I would not want to marry you.

Though I will say - he does have such awful judgment, generally, it’s almost weird that his house is not full of throw pillows that say “It’s not how many breaths you take, it’s how many moments that take your breath away.”  I actually thought, this time, ‘who did he hire as an interior decorator?  And does that person follow him around and throw out the beer bottles and used condoms and tchotchkes and whatever other detritus?’  Because you just know what kind of man he is.

He’s never once in control of his destiny; he doesn’t seem to see anything coming, starting with the boulder that crashes into frame just after the opening credits. He’s the mark the whole time, and he’s lucky to make it home alive.

Back to Teddy/Ian McShane: I wonder whether the writers of Better Call Saul were thinking of this guy when they wrote that amazing scene with Lalo Salamanca and Saul and Kim at the end of Season [5?], the “tell it to me again” scene. It’s just such a power move. Teddy knows Gal is lying when he says that Don rang him from Heathrow to say he arrived (does that really sound like something Don would do?) - he’s a bad liar! But now that he’s got Gal in London, he’ll use him to pull off his flawless heist and then insult him by giving him, what, 20 bucks before leaving his sorry ass by the side of the road? That’s some Lalo Salamanca shit right there, minus the murder.

Damn, I really want to watch this movie again now.

I didn’t draw that comparison, but that makes sense.  Lalo and Teddy are in the pantheon of calculating, cold-blooded gangster bosses.

Seriously though, what did you think of Aitch and Jackie?  What is their relationship to Gal and DeeDee?  I feel like that relationship is really important to the film, but I have a hard time pinning down why.  The Jackie-Don connection is crucial to understanding Don Logan.  But Don could’ve had that relationship with DeeDee instead.  I’m asking, maybe from a screenwriter’s perspective, why do those characters exist?  What does it say about Gal, or about anything else in the story, that he is amorphously coexisting with these people?

Great point, and i was trying to come up with something to say about them earlier and was coming up short. I got the sense that Aitch and Jackie are Gal and Deedee’s only friends, and that’s in part because you know those dudes don’t speak a word of Spanish and in part because the men at least have this shared history of involvement with organized crime, which means that they are each for one another the only company in which they can be their full selves. Which matters! They did a good job of not-showily establishing that these people are all really good friends, that they somewhat depend on each other for a variety of things, and that clearly Gal has the sweet pool so that’s where they always hang out unless they’re getting calamari at the nice restaurant. That was a nice piece of backstory that was required, I think, for Gal to be remotely compelling as a character. I’m thinking specifically of the way Jackie and Aitch bring Don to the house and they all just sit there SUPER AWKWARDLY in the living room and Don is just prickly AF in response to all attempts to make small talk and it’s clear that this is not going to be a friendly meeting, and Aitch without needing any real prompting just ups and says he’s taking the ladies out to get a bite to eat. There’s something lovely about that; he’s not just taking Jackie and leaving Deedee and Gal to their fate; he’s helping his friend by defusing the situation slightly and also by making sure Deedee isn’t around to hear or see whatever happens next. 

So, despite my not pulling any punches (see above, throw pillow) regarding my general opinion of Gal, I do think that the film gives us a satisfying ending by letting us see that he returns home to a repaired swimming pool (the pink tiled hearts in the bottom are lame AF, but the camera has let us know that Don is now concealed underneath them forever, so joke’s on him I guess) and to his sweet little social life.

I’m still not sure I think that the whole relationship between Jackie and Don was so crucial to all of it, but I guess if it somehow gives context to Don’s awfulness, sure. 

I think you’re right about them allowing Gal to be his whole self.  If not for Aitch and Jackie, you’d just see Gal hanging at the pool with his wife and you might think he was tempted away from a life of crime by an infatuation with this woman.  But it’s very clear, with Aitch and Jackie around, that these are people who chose to retire in this particular way and just hang out with each other.  There’s no doubt about who they are and what they want out of life, which is to be leathery, aging doofuses sitting around a pool all day and then going to restaurants and nightclubs and having vanilla sex with their beloved partners.

What’s really funny to me about the movie is that both Don and Teddy are breathtakingly oppressive, frightening characters, in their own very different ways, and their behavior is violent and selfish and reprehensible in every way -- and yet they’re both fundamentally correct in their assessment of Gal as a delusional asshole.

By delusional I mean, there’s no way that Gal’s retirement is a long-term solution.  He’s clearly had a long crime career before the movie, hence retirement.  He’s seen too much, knows too much.  We all know, from literally every crime movie ever, that you don’t escape The Life.  But more practically, it’s tough to believe that he has enough money to go to fancy Spanish restaurants and nightclubs for the next three decades, and with all that suntanning and rich foods and lack of exercise...this is a guy who retired at 47 or whatever and he is going to last maybe two years before he either dies of a heart attack, goes bankrupt, or just gets bored or bullied and goes back to crime.  And Don and Teddy are both people who see that, who understand Gal better than Gal understands himself, and they really loathe him for it.  You get the sense that if Gal wasn’t really good at underwater tunneling or whatever, they’d just murder him for fun.

Yeah, absolutely. You make a great point about how unsustainable Gal’s retirement plan is. In part, the organized crime ecosystem (and I’m talking about organized crime as depicted in movies, and I would argue that this movie is absolutely owning its movie-ness) depends on the notion that no one can really retire. Teddy’s bread-and-butter heists only work if a bunch of guys show up to do the grunt work and drill through the underwater walls, and I think we can assume that at least some of those guys wouldn’t show up if they felt like they had a choice; Teddy’s gravitational pull relies on there being few good options in this world besides working for him. So he’s not only insulted and offended by Gal’s choices, he’s fundamentally threatened by them. I think Don operates on a slightly less cerebral level, and he’s more driven by his gut-level loathing of Gal’s retirement. I wonder, though, whether there is part of him that kind of wants that. If there’s any purpose to the Don-Jackie sexual history, it’s that it indicates that part of Don does long for whatever it is that Jackie represents. He’s triumphant in announcing that they had sex once, but he also indicates that he wanted more, that he had deeper feelings for her (which she presumably didn’t share), which sort of suggests to me that his loathing of Gal is more to do with wanting what Gal has on some level, and I’d also guess that that desire in and of itself troubles him.

I’m still asking myself what the deal with the title is. Like Rosebud, it seems kind of beside the point, because there is so much great stuff to unpack here and it’s just a fun movie. But also, I want to know why it’s called that! Is the phrase sexy beast even uttered during the movie?

Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that.  I think the phrase applies to Gal, Don, and Teddy in different ways.  They are each sexy and bestial and they use those traits completely differently. 

You’re onto something with Don-Jackie.  The one redeeming quality about Gal, for the viewer, is his very sincere love for his wife DeeDee.  That phone call, where she won’t even talk to him and he’s trying to write her poetry and failing because he knows he might get murdered soon--it’s quite a scene.  That really redeems some of his choices.

And the converse to that is two scenes: first, Don talking to himself in the mirror like Smeagol-Gollum, pissing on the carpet and monologuing until his anger takes over and he runs into Gal’s bedroom to beat him up; and second, Don whispering with his dying breath that he loves Jackie.  You just know that Don is terrified of the softness inside himself, he knows he wants what Gal has and he hates both himself and Gal for that.

I sort of wonder whether or how Teddy fits into that contrast.  He too is a sexy beast.  But does he feel love?  Does he want to?  We see him having sex, and then we see him murder his lover, seemingly pretty casually, because the guy is a loose end.  And then he lets Gal go free, saying that if he’d cared about Don at all Gal would be dead.  In other words it’s all a transaction for him.  Is that sexy?  Beastlike?

Ooh, that’s good. I think Teddy’s theoretical sexiness is well argued by the way his character is staged; he is never not in control, which is a touchstone of cultural male sexuality. If the male protagonist of the Hollywood movie tends to map onto a continuum of masculinity somewhere between softness and hardness, then this movie creates the extreme poles of that continuum in the characters of Gal and Teddy. 

The opening shot is literally of Gal’s soft belly as he rubs oil into his skin while lying next to his heart-tiled swimming pool. He visibly and unabashedly adores his wife and would do anything for her. Teddy, on the other hand, as you noted, demonstrates no emotional engagement with sexual activity or other human beings in any way. 

In stark contrast to the vulnerability that Gal serves up to us in that first shot, Teddy is introduced at great remove. If I remember correctly, we learn of the orgy as a story that some dude told Don and that Don then tells Gal, so we as audience are hearing about it thirdhand as the camera smash-cuts from one narration to the other, intercutting reaction shots from Gal as it goes. It’s one of the best-edited sequences in a movie I have ever seen and I laughed out loud several times. Teddy is so untouchable; compare that fast-paced sequence to how long the camera lingers on Gal’s sunburned belly at the beginning. We linger so little on Teddy that we actually have to be shown that dolly shot of him walking away from the bank one more time so that we can be shown the steam bath again. The point of all this is that I think Teddy is just as much a sexy beast as the other two. In the parlance of toxic masculinity, he’s the platonic ideal; he’s devoid of emotion, attachment, and at a certain level, humanity. 

The key there might be that we aren’t seeing Teddy’s perspective, we’re getting the story second-hand as you say.  Perhaps Teddy isn’t superhuman in his sexy detachment, but that is the way that Gal and Don see him.  Perhaps it tore his heart to pieces to murder Harry.  The point seems to be that he’ll never let Gal or Don or us inside enough to know - that’s the part they respect and fear and maybe what makes him so captivating.

I obviously wish Ian McShane had more lines, but his distance from us compared to Gal’s proximity is a nod to what sexy means culturally; it’s almost a caricature of what many men think they aspire to. What would call itself sexy is often in fact beastlike, when you account for its disregard for the humanity of others (and it is also worthwhile to point out here that, as you said in your comments about the orgy scene,Teddy’s sexuality is quite ambiguous! And the viewer who just tells himself that of course Teddy is having sex with he woman is definitely making the choice not to see that!).

And I think you’re very right: Don is desperate to be a Teddy but hates the Gal in himself. 

And it’s funny because we have spent a lot of this post hating on Gal! We kind of scorn him! Whereas it’s hard not to admire Teddy and love every minute that he’s onscreen, because it doesn’t feel like we get enough - a lot of that is down to our love for Ian McShane, but also there’s a reason why they cast him! The movie might be right about us.

Oh definitely.  It was a shocking movie to me when I was 18, and I’ve remembered it for a long time for reasons I didn’t entirely understand, and watching it again now I feel like I just didn’t know myself (and film history and criticism) well enough to really grasp it at the time.

I think we really got to the heart of this movie, and I agree we should watch it again.  One last thought - you briefly mentioned the pool boy.  That’s another character where I wonder why he’s there.  There’s clearly a paternalistic angle to his relationship with Gal, but you’re definitely also supposed to wonder whether they’re fucking.  My best guess is that, as Don arrives and pool boy gets roped into the violence of The Life, it builds the sense of ‘Gal, what are you doing, this retirement situation is weird and untenable’.  Maybe you need an outsider character for that.  But it also adds a layer of bestiality to both Gal and, later, Don.  It’s uncomfortable.

Totally. Also, though, that moment when Don is on his way and Gal tells the kid to stay away for a few days is another opportunity to see Gal’s little old heart at work, trying to keep the people close to him safe. Similar to the moment when Aitch ushers both Deedee and Jackie out of the house to protect them from Don, which I mentioned above really stood out to me. It’s uncomfortable but also very ambiguous, and depending on what you want to see in Gal, it could mean many things about his sexuality and his relationship to power.

These are the little details that I noticed watching the film one time, and they’re very understated but also part of the fabric of this little life Gal is trying to protect. And it’s interesting to me that you kind of can’t help wanting him to succeed in saving that life and returning to it unscathed, even though it seems wildly unrealistic and impractical in the long term. The biggest liability in movie-rule-following organized crime is to care for people in any genuine way, because the Teddy in charge is always going to exploit the existence of things and people that the Gals of the world care about. Isn’t that sort of why the Teddy ideal is so sexy? You’re absolutely correct in that we don’t really get Teddy’s inner perspective, ever, and that we therefore don’t know anything about his actual feelings, only what he projects. In writing this I have thought about Fight Club’s Tyler Durden a few times, the raw manifestation of Ed Norton’s narrator’s masculinity and aggression. Like Teddy, he’s sort of unknowable, immune to the perils of true emotion, fully capable of manipulating others because he knows what they desire and how much they desire it, whereas he has this (again) control that others can only wish they had, and indeed, the fight club forms out of the desire of others to be like him. And if that movie isn’t about sexiness, my god, let’s not forget who plays Tyler Durden and how that character was received when the movie came out.

Whew - I had the sense when watching this movie that it was about toxic masculinity to some degree, but the depth of this descent has surprised me! I kind of love that - it was extremely fun to watch, and then on reconsideration (again, I have only seen it once, so none of this memory of detail has come from rewatch) there is so much more to it than you see immediately when you’re just in it. And I felt like I was “in it” the whole time we were watching - I don’t know the actual run time but it felt like a really short movie; it just flew.

Yeah, I agree.  It’s funny, my memory watching it the first time was I was just dying for the Ben Kingsley / Don Logan part to be over.  Because I knew it was a heist film and I wanted to get to the heist.  And then the heist came and went and I was like damn, I want more of that!  Which means I was both exactly the right and wrong person for this film.  It’s great to have a film like that, that benchmarks your development as a person.