Pain and Gain
Some major stars have four great roles in four years – but Colin Farrell is in a league of his own. With 2022 ending with The Banshees of Inisherin, the Irish actor’s year has been defined by winning and losing – Rory Doherty makes sense of what that means for Farrell as a performer.
Every month we'll be teaming up with IMDb to bring you a guide to the work of some of your favourite stars, whether that's behind or in front of the camera. This month, a look at the chameleonic Colin Farrell during his banner year.
Stories consist of a series of gains and losses. They map out a road towards a goal, one plagued with setbacks, that will lead people on to tangible or illusory wins. Threading through this is change; how are we transformed by our circumstances and the way we seek to change them? If our character’s journey is defined by loss, it triggers a need to regain stability and reinstate the status quo – only to realise they can’t return to the normality they lost. If our goal is to win something, we get to explore thornier questions of motivation, as people confront how what drives them defines the kind of person they are.
Like stories, Colin Farrell’s career has been defined by a series of ups and downs. He shot to prominence in Phone Booth, a two-hander between him and a public telephone, and continued his ascent as charismatic foils for Steven Spielberg and Marvel – only to come crashing down with a double-whammy of flops (the blunt and bloated Alexander, the lo-fi, frenetic Miami Vice) and a breaking point in his personal life, seeking help for drug and alcohol addictions.. Since being put back on the map with Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges, he has repeatedly proven his ability to play it tough, funny, wounded, and everything in between – and this year, he did it no less than four times.
Farrell’s 2022 quadriptych –The Batman, Thirteen Lives, After Yang, and The Banshees of Inisherin – differ greatly in tone and genre, but the people he brings to life are all defined by a state of grief or an intense desire to win something. Their goals are so internalised that there’s no way to separate them from their quest for kinship, safety, epiphany, or power, even if not all of them are allowed the opportunity for self-reflection.
The two films where Farrell’s character is focused on winning are also the ones broader in scope and appeal, with each standing on polar opposites of morality as hero and villain. The Batman sees Farrell play The Penguin, a mid-level but power-hungry member of the Falcone crime family, a role that requires even more expressive eyebrows from Farrell than usual due to a coating of extensive facial prosthetics. The Penguin, or Oswald Cobblepot, is contradictorily loyal and conspiring; he does the busywork he’s asked, but all the while conspiring to further his own position. But he draws the line at being a turncoat; the faithful goon makes a public display of condemning his own boss on the assumption he’s a rat.
This loose code is robust enough to let Oswald justify his own ascent to power, bolstered by a mix of opportunism and fake-it-til-you-make-it bravado. When Batman threatens him with violence, Oswald responds with a broad Italian-American accented exclamation, a reaction that feels more suited to seeing someone burning a bolognese than a fist being thrown at you. Ambition is potent enough to convince Oswald he’s owed what he schemes for, which is fitting considering The Batman’s thematic treatise on uncovering a conspiracy of powerful people choosing influence over accountability. To Oswald, others can be lambasted and discarded, but the self is morally impenetrable. To get what he wants, everyone else has to be perceived and treated as a threat.
This is why the altruism of Farrell in Thirteen Lives makes such a startling point of comparison. Farrell plays rescue diver John Volanthen, one of the engineers of the 2018 Thai cave rescue. John’s muted demeanour doesn’t suggest he’s the best in the world at anything, but due to a lack of renown or funding for rescue diving, it’s easy to accept its leading authorities resemble a pair of unassuming but passionate middle-aged English dads. While there’s a loss in Thirteen Lives, it’s not directly John’s; what drives him, rather, is a keenly felt sense of responsibility, understanding that his skills come with an obligation to do his utmost no matter the circumstances. When stress lines those famous bushy brows it’s with the added burden of, after laboriously convincing political and military officials to heed to his instruction, the fact that his neck will be on the line if his dangerous plan doesn’t work.
While Oswald gets what he wants with an aggrandised sense of ego, never admitting any self-doubt or introspection, John is incapable of forgetting what he owes to others. While Oswald chooses to exploit the corruptions of an unfair system to better themselves, whereas John enters a humanitarian crisis as a uniquely skilled outsider already accepting the expectations burdening him. The contrasting ways Oswald and John value and prioritise themselves speaks to corresponding interpersonal anxieties, a hyper-awareness of how others want to halt their progress or demand their success; these fears and doubts develop regardless if these men try to succeed in opposition or in harmony with other people's goals.
While an alluring goal propels John and Oswald forward to action, loss makes Farrell’s other characters turn to the past. After Yang and The Banshees of Inisherin may be set over 100 years apart, but when tea sommelier and father Jake and simple-minded dairy farmer Pádraic each lose a close relationship – a robot companion and a curmudgeonly older friend respectively – it upends the balance of their lives.
For Jake, Yang acted as a bridge between parents and adopted child, their Chinese daughter Mika, but what began as a temporary aid became a crucial part of the family unit. Farrell, along with the rest of director Kogonada’s cast, plays everything soft and gentle, but Jake’s pleasant amiability can sometimes act as a distancing tool, used to divert questions he can’t answer away from the uncomfortable territory of unresolved vulnerability. After Yang dies, Jake’s family doesn’t have any artificial life to bridge the gaps of understanding and connection between parents and daughter. Jake doesn’t just lose a robot helper, he loses the ability to avoid tough questions.
Although he probably couldn’t explain why, Pádraic’s vacuous shade of craic has a similar effect. His blathering is designed to fill the silence and feign closeness while sinking Guinness’ with his drinking partner Colm – until the latter chooses to sever their friendship, citing Pádraic’s dullness as the cause. Farrell’s best 2022 performance is also 2022’s best performance; arching those fuzzy caterpillars and pouting like a wounded puppy as Colm’s rejection triggers an avalanche of self-doubt and anxiety. How can you deal with a loss if you can’t articulate the ways it unspools you?
While Jake used to have Yang curiously probing at what defines him – even coaxing a Werner Herzog impression out of him – Pádraic lacks the vocabulary to interrogate the inadequacies Colm’s rejection makes him feel. While Jake has to engage head-on with Yang’s loss to repair the stability of his family, Pádraic is left to pathetically paw at Colm’s sleeve insisting they should go back to normal, without ever pinning down what that normality actually meant. Jake, by contrast, realises retroactively the ways Yang had emotionally cushioned his death by making Jake’s family reflect on what matters to them and how they relate to others. The next chapter, the one the film doesn’t reveal, reveals how the family will be defined without Yang. But we know they’ll remain whole. Yet Pádraic’s tragic arc makes only one thing clear – there is no going back, and his attempts at recovery have only internalised the troubling feelings Colm has brought to light.
Colin Farrell’s booked-and-busy year has created a patchwork of men, each offering someone attempting to resolve chaos or reaching for clarity. They’re making sense of fatherhood and fraternity, fuelled by internal contradictions and doubts, and are all concerned with what they mean to others. You can’t extract the totality of masculinity in a single performance, but as Colin Farrell has shown, four can give you a solid head start.
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