The Gentlest Men
Is Guy Ritchie the ultimate babygirl?
The Gentleman is a riotous good time; it’s a meditation on power and a punch-em-up mob thriller, a showcase for tweed, a compendium of British accents high and low. It presents like a hard-nosed action comedy but it’s got a heart softer than a hot chocolate bomb.
Some directors seem strangely untouchable, as if no box office result can prevent them from releasing largely the same film next year with similar results. Guy Ritchie is one of these directors. He has made some truly horrendous movies in the last few years, but this has not had any observable impact on his output. He’s directed gems (Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, The Man from U.N.C.L.E.) and he’s also directed Aladdin (which was bad but made a billion dollars) and The Covenant (a movie that inexplicably insisted on always being referred to as Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant). He has created a conveyor belt of comedy/crime/action movies, many starring the same ~10 male beefcakes and plus or minus one woman, if you’re lucky.
Biographically, he is British through and through. His father was a member of the Seaforth Highlanders, a Scottish infantry regiment that saw action in the World Wars. Ritchie was kicked out of primary school for smoking and consorting with girls. A few decades later, he was married to Madonna; his father’s second wife was a Baroness. He discovered Jason Statham. He loves Sherlock Holmes. He has a black belt in Judo. He adores manly British actors, stuffing his films with as many of them as he can until they’re popping out the sides of the cast photos, biceps straining, devil-may-care grins on their handsome faces.
His influences are easy to spot; he was raised on Spaghetti Westerns and heist films. Watching one of his movies, you can see some noir, too, but he seems to have reacted to noir by wanting to tidy away all the shadows and smooth out all the wrinkles on Bogart’s forehead. The defining feature of his movies, for me, is a desire to protect his precious boys from the realities of the situations he’s placed them in. He gives you a character so stuffed with qualities that he cannot possibly be extinguished from this world by the machinations of Nazis or the scheming of disreputable crimelords. I wrote about this in my review of his 2024 movie The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, saying
What a MOVIE this is. It feels like a MOVIE. It stars every beefcake you’ve ever heard of and is about buff spies in WWII smoking cigars on sailboats and killing Nazis, creatively. There is one woman with lines. From that description, you can guess that it is a movie by Guy Ritchie, who loves the characters in this movie so much he gives little bios for who they’re based on and what happened to them in the remaining years of the war. He also loves them so much he neglects to mention they all died terribly within five years of the action of the film. What can I say? British spies are immortal.
So what happens when the king of the comedy crime blockbuster/flop takes on television? Somehow, this medium has played into almost all his best instincts. The Gentlemen is a television version of his 2019 film of the same name and follows the same rough setup: a weed-growing crime family has been planting vast cannabis farms underneath the British aristocracy’s country homes (with their cooperation). Weed is not legal in England, although widely used, and this agreement gives them a safe place to grow their produce while providing much-needed funds for the upkeep of the aristocracy’s crumbling estates.
The television version works for a few reasons. For one, Ritchie has to complete a thought each episode. He can’t just throw seven biceps together, arm them with whatever’s to hand and point them at Nazis for three hours. The smaller time horizon of the episodic format works to restrain Ritchie. Second, he’s cast Theo James as his main character, a newly minted duke and military man who inherits the weed portion of his father’s estate and initially tries to find a way out from under the unsavory obligation. James is a star and has been looking for the right place to show it. That place was the second season of The White Lotus, where he evinced more range than any previous role had afforded him. He is the calm center of the show, a position he takes immediately but also keeps earning as we get to know him. He’s ruthlessly pragmatic, has his own well-developed code of honor, and wears the fuck out of a tweed peacoat. It’s almost enough to make me forget that despite being previously familiar with the London underworld, he seems to fit in as if to the manor born. Finally, Ritchie has given us a complex female character and several supporting female characters. This is not something Ritchie is known for; we will not speak of Operation Fortune: Russe de Guerre but no one has ever so misused, wasted, and insulted Aubrey Plaza. In The Gentleman, we have Susie Glass (Kaya Scodelerio), a cockney schemer running her father’s crime family while he’s in prison, and doing it well. It’s a simple request, but if Ritchie could simply try to add a woman with an actual character (and not just a collection of male fantasies) to all his projects, I think they would instantly increase in quality tenfold. It worked with The Man From U.N.C.L.E; it will work elsewhere.
The Gentleman is interested in more complicated questions than Ritchie’s more recent films have been. It is a meditation on different types of power; James’ Eddie begins as a character with a certain kind of power (martial, physical, mental), then quickly gains a new type (inherited class-dominant power, big ass mansion), but needs a still different type (financial). To get that power, he has to give away bits and pieces of himself, ending the series in a position of dominance but far from his original position as a respected peacekeeper. Susie Glass begins as a character with inherited family power working to establish individual respect but is forced to contend with the privileged white man jockeying for a space in her world. She ends the series in a position of shared power with Eddie, a victory but also a concession.
Ritchie’s worst instinct, to my mind, is his desire to protect his characters so fiercely. Although everyone is sort of constantly in danger in this series, no one is ever hurt. There are no real consequences for anyone’s actions, either physical or emotional. Eddie’s character arc forces him to confront his relationship to power and honor, his conception of what it means to be a gentleman. Roughly, you could say that a gentleman is a man with power (physical, financial, inherited, class, racial) who uses that power judiciously. Eddie makes many choices in his pursuit of power, some of which should come back to bite him in the ass. But they never really do. He, like all of Ritchie’s beloved boys, dodges every bullet. So too, does everyone else. Susie Glass triumphs to the limits she’s allowed, her brother although beaten basically to death in a boxing ring, wakes up and has no lasting damage. Eddie’s brother, who gets in debt to the tune of $8 million and murders a crime lord, gets away with the deed entirely and even repairs his relationship with his brother. Their head of weed creation literally reveals all their secrets to a rival because he’s employed a cute girl to trick him and they’re not even that mad at him? Even the villains get to retire to a cozy prison estate where they serve Kobe beef and you get to keep your tweed. The series has such style, such panache, aplomb, and all other such things that you can so easily just lay back and enjoy it. But I do worry that this lack of stakes will sink an otherwise excellent ship. But maybe I’m wrong, and the invincibility of these characters will act upon us the way the guaranteed Happily Ever After (HEA) does in romance novels, creating a cocoon of safety and we’ll just enjoy the hijinks for many years to come.
In researching this article, I found myself Googling “Has anyone ever died in a Guy Ritchie movie?” just to see what would come up. If the AI Overview is to be trusted (dubious), the answer is no. What a vicious, soft world Ritchie has created.