The Merry Gentleman

This is a deceptively simple film where one of the main characters is a hit man, and even though that fact matters for the plot, its really not that important. When was the last time you could say that about a film featuring a contract killer? The story revolves around a young woman, played by Kelly McDonald, who recently moved away from an abusive relationship. One night she sees the aforementioned hitman (played my Michael Keaton also directing) on a ledge of a building (this is right after he's killed someone) apparently ready to jump. She screams and he falls back on the roof. He later seeks her out (she of course having no idea he is the same man she saw earlier) and they begin the kind of relationship that results when you have two lonely people trying to make a connection. There is some action surrounding the police pursuit of the killer, but really the film is first and foremost about their relationship, and to be honest that's all I needed.

The film plays everything low key and real, and does a nice job capturing how people actually talk and interact (discomfort, awkwardness, etc.) It also doesn't feel the need to explain everyone's motivations and thoughts, instead letting the audience just experience the character interactions and draw their own conclusions. I particularly enjoyed that the film didn't feel it necessary to provide an explanation for Keaton's character was a hitman, or who he was killing and why. That's just who he was and we should accept it.

The film that I was actually most reminded by of this was Once. Not because the female leads in both of them had great accents, but rather because they're both little understated movies that took genres that 90% of the time end of feeling flashy and artificial (the musical for Once, hitman film for this one) and made them feel natural and completely organic. I'm not saying that The Merry Gentleman is the greatest thing of all time (that would of course be Crank 2), and I do have some minor quibbles but for once I'm going to abstain from listing them (I must be getting soft). I'll just say that I really enjoyed seeing something that exhibited a fair bit of intelligence in its execution and nice feel for how people interact in real life (or so I've heard since I never leave me apartment I wouldn't actually know).