Mike Hodges caught my eye with his fatalistic I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, in which the protagonist's vengeance was doled out with such sad, resigned futility and the gray sky seemed to engulf the characters, judging their abject dealings. A similar air of determinism permeates his first feature, a remarkably grim revenge story whose avenger might be the most corrupt figure in the film. Michael Caine is Jack Carter, the smooth antihero who can only communicate through money, sex, or violence, utterly incapable of real human empathy. Resembling James Bond in his lothario qualities—and the way women seem to suffer most at his hand—and a transplanted Philip Marlowe in his affected, aloof manner of speech and action, Carter ventures up north to London to bury his brother and maybe to see if any foul play was involved. Of course there was, in the form of a local crime syndicate that traffics in drugs and sex. The revelatory scene where Carter puts the pieces together is a brilliant piece of acting, direction and editing, as Caine begins the scene as casual observer and gradually registers increments of grief, guilt and anger while the camera proportionately cuts back to the shocking evidence at which he's aghast. One might say that his subsequent path of rampage is an agonized attempt to exorcise his guilt—at not being there, at being so slow to uncover the motive, at being a voyeur to the crime—and as such there's no valor in his vengeance, only a meaningless quest to mollify his soul. Hodges' refusal to beautify Carter's violence lends the picture an unusual complexity, a kind of implicit mourning for the world's perpetual cycle of violence that benefits no one. (When Carter dumps a key player over a parking-garage wall, Hodges lingers over the car he fell on as paramedics remove the vehicle's likely deceased innocent bystanders.) Jack might think he's gained some hard-earned wares on that beach with his vanquished enemy, but his self-satisfied smile is quickly and permanently removed. This is another extraordinary, unsparing movie from Mike Hodges.
Review of Get Carter
