There have been movies made in Greater Cincinnati recently that have been respected as cinematic art and even become awards contenders — The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Carol, The Fits, The Ides of March. And there are some that have gone the opposite way — Gotti and Reprisal.
But with Donnybrook, which was filmed in this region in 2017 and is now getting its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, it’s hard to tell whether it will be received as art or exploitation. Early reviews out of Toronto have been mixed, but the positive ones have been ecstatic, comparing it to Fight Club and No Country for Old Men.
And the fact that Toronto scheduled it as last Friday’s opening firm for its Platform programming section, a juried competition (with a sizeable cash award) for international films that lack North American distribution but have directorial vision, means someone there thinks it has high potential. In 2016, Platform launched Moonlight, that year’s Oscar-winner. The jurors this year are auteurist heavyweights — Margarethe von Trotta, Bela Tarr and Lee Chang-dong.
Here are Toronto’s program notes: “The fourth feature from writer-director Tim Sutton, this hard-hitting drama tells the story of two men — an ex-marine who struggles to provide for his family and a violent drug dealer with an undefeated fighting record — who are determined to compete in the Donnybrook, a legendary, bare-knuckle brawl with a cash prize of $100,000.
With his fourth feature, writer-director Tim Sutton captures an America ignored by many Americans. His is not a country of tree-lined streets, white picket fences, and family barbeques, but one of clandestine drug deals, shady motel rooms, alcohol-fuelled brawls, and abandoned dreams.
Earl (Jamie Bell) and Angus (Frank Grillo) both inhabit society's fringes. Their similarity stops there. "Jarhead Earl" is a veteran, husband, and father of two. His cancer-stricken wife needs expensive treatment, leading him to commit crimes that go against his nature. "Chainsaw Angus," on the other hand, runs a local meth ring with his sister, Delia (Margaret Qualley). Having long suffered his emotional and physical beatings, she is looking for any way out. With the well-intentioned — if a little corrupt and a lot drunk — local sheriff (James Badge Dale) hot on their tails, the two men are destined to meet at the Donnybrook, where the last man standing in a bare-knuckle cage fight takes home a cash prize of $100,000. Though faced with a succession of miserable choices, Earl fights bravely for his family's future. Having left a trail of death and destruction in his wake, Angus fights to quench an unspecified thirst for revenge.
With his brutal and unrelenting style, Sutton holds nothing back and neither do his actors: Bell, Grillo, and Qualley all deliver stunning, raw performances. At once uncomfortably gritty and palpably polished, Donnybrook explores an America that's struggling to overcome its demons, and those within it struggling to claw their way back.”
The film is based on a 2012 novel of the same name, set in small-town Indiana, by Frank Bill, whose other books include Crimes in Southern Indiana (short stories) and The Savage.
The production attracted comparatively little attention in Cincinnati proper when shot here in 2017. But in Middletown, it became big news last October, when filming was done there.
A Journal-News story described the action: “On Thursday, Donnybrook crews were filming along Central Avenue storefronts between Clark and Clinton streets in Middletown. Vehicle traffic and pedestrians were diverted from the area during the filming. Film crews will be back during the next few months to shoot in Middletown, according to Shelby Quinlivan, city communications coordinator. In the open lots behind the buildings was the base camp with dressing rooms and other support staff. Along sections of Central Avenue, there were several large trucks and trailers parked as well as small tents set up on the sidewalk.”
Late last week, the Los Angeles Times published an advance story by Jen Yamato on the film, headlined (online) “Toronto premiere 'Donnybrook' charts a dark journey into America's heartland and the roots of white rage.”
Here’s a portion: “Not everyone was up to the challenge of bringing director Tim Sutton’s brutal bare-knuckle brawl drama Donnybrook to the screen. Like the everyman warriors of the near-mythic cage fight at its center, the film pulls no punches as it surveys a country locked in dog-eat-dog conflict, afflicted by vicious cycles of violence — physical, emotional, spiritual — and traumas that have never healed.
“I had one actor say after a few meetings that he wasn’t sure he wanted to do something that was so dark, and I was like, ‘Well — that’s the movie,’” said Sutton, whose bold fourth feature stars Jamie Bell, Frank Grillo, James Badge Dale and Margaret Qualley in a startling and riveting turn.
“Opening the Toronto Film Festival’s Platform section Friday as a title available for acquisition, Donnybrook is at once a requiem for a certain segment of America, and a clarion call for all to take a hard inward look at how and why we’ve arrived at such a tumultuous time in the nation’s history.” Here is a link.
And at Toronto, Variety quickly published a rave review by Peter DeBruge. It read, in part: “For Sutton — whose previous film, Dark Night, inspired by 2012’s Aurora megaplex shooting, made an austere statement about gun violence — Donnybrook marks a major step forward in both ambition and style, earning the distinction of opening the Toronto Film Festival’s competitive Platform section.”
He also raises the No Country for Old Men comparison. “From the opening monologue, spoken by a grizzled backwoods hermit who ferries Jarhead Earl toward the Donnybrook, Sutton’s script sounds like No Country for Old Men — or more accurately, like the kind of elegiac, coal-black portrait of dead-end America that Cormac McCarthy has been peddling all these years.” (He also compares Grillo’s character, Chainsaw Angus, to No Country’s Anton Chigurh.)
A British publication — somewhat removed from the immediacy of the hate and violence now roiling America —reviewed Donnybrook at Toronto and did not like it. In The Guardian, Benjamin Lee wrote that the film, “ “a squalid, self-important tale of a man entering a bare-knuckle fighting competition to save his family, isn’t quite the bold statement on working-class America it seems to think it is.”
He further states that, “in a year that’s seen a number of humane, incisive films address the increase in poverty in America, such as Andrew Haigh’s Lean on Pete and Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace, the lumbering arrival of Donnybrook feels like even more of a misstep. It’s a pulpy slab of exploitation masquerading as an important treatise on the struggles faced by the working class in rural America, thumping us in the face with its shallow viewpoint until we beg for mercy. Or at least the credits.”
As Screen International write Tim Grieson posted, “Because I've been running around like a crazy person, I was not aware that the reviews for Donnybrook have been incredibly divisive. Well, put me in the fan column. I dug it quite a lot.”( His review is up at Screen International.)
As the film gets seen at subsequent Toronto screenings, and especially if it gets distribution, we’ll have to watch to see what additional critics are saying. Is this a Great American film? Or violence for it’s own sake? Will talk build, or die out? Stayed tuned.
