Film Review: BECKETT (2021): John David Washington Excels in Emotional and Adrenaline-Fueled Political Thriller

Beckett Review

Beckett (2021) Film Review, a movie directed by Ferdinando Cito Filomarino, starring John David Washington, Vicky Krieps, Boyd Holbrook, Alicia Vikander, Yorgos Pirpassopoulos, Lena Kitsopoulou, Isabelle Margara, Omiros Poulakis, Michael Stuhlbarg, Panos Koronis, Andreas Marianos, Yannis Kokiasmenos, Yorgos Vasiliou, Olga Spyraki, Marc Marder, Maria Votti.

What’s every American’s greatest fear when they travel abroad: forgetting their passport at home? getting lost in translation? stumbling into a complicated political conspiracy? Obviously the latter, or at least Ferdinando Cito Filomarino thinks so with his new mystery actioner Beckett. But beyond basic thrills and bureaucratic corruption, the film is a robust study of grief and regret, and how the audacity of our surrounding world forces us to keep looking forward before we can properly process all these emotions.

Beckett follows the titular character, played by John David Washington, as he and his girlfriend April (Alicia Vikander) enjoy a romantic romp through Greece. Leaving on a late-night excursion from Athens to a more remote locale so as to avoid an upcoming political rally, Beckett dozes off at the wheel and the couple careen off the road, crashing into a house and fatally wounding April. After giving as detailed an account of the crash to the police as he can (which includes seeing some people still living in the house, which police tell him was abandoned), a distraught Beckett returns to the scene in order to find some sense of closure.

Soon after his return, though, a mysterious woman (Lena Kitsopoulou) and one of the cops who interviewed him (Panos Koronis) ambush Beckett with gunfire. He takes off against the rocky Grecian countryside, seeking refuge wherever he can and with whomever is kind enough to assist him (not to mention speak enough broken English to help him formulate his next steps). Desperate to get back to the U.S. Embassy in Athens, Beckett starts a cross-country journey of hopping trains and hitchhiking with left-wing activists (Vicky Krieps and Maria Votti), sustaining multiple injuries in a tireless fight for survival. But these crooked cops are still hot on his tail, and seeing as he’s stumbled onto a conspiracy with national consequences, they’re nowhere near giving up the chase.

Based on the marketing that stresses Luca Guadagnino’s producorial role and Filomarino’s history as his go-to second unit director, you’d think Beckett would succumb to the latter’s self-aggrandizing thematic flourishes, complete with all the punch-drunk Mediterranean mise-en-scène you could ask for. And that’s not wholly wrong, given the opening exposition that’s almost suffocating in its sense of saccharine. But the inciting car crash lights the plot’s fuse that refuses to be extinguished, running all the way until the explosive finale and injecting us with so much anxiety in its doing so.

Filomarino takes the fish-out-of-water archetype and engorges it to an international scale. We feel the same sense of panic that Beckett feels: a man suddenly alone amidst a land and culture he knows nothing about and forced to flee for his life. Even in the interactions he has with the locals Beckett only gets poor translations from the bilingual ones, and the filmmakers don’t do us the courtesy of providing English subtitles either (it is, quite literally, all Greek to me).

Despite some late-in-the-game Bourne riffs that slightly overstep the film’s reach, the film posits Beckett as nothing but an American layman trying his best to survive. Doses of fight-or-flight adrenaline and a generally fit stature propel him along, of course, but they also don’t make him immune to harm and other physical duress. That (as well as his lack of CIA training) makes him and his struggles seem all the more “believable”. (Honestly, after all the bones he breaks and gunshots and stabbings he sustains – as a tourist, no less! – we’re impressed and relieved that he’s still hobbling along to the finish line at all).

And yet, even in the face of death, there’s still a quaint sense of beauty. Using Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s camerawork that wonderfully captures Greece’s variety of vistas and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s string-heavy music that scratches on our nerves, Filomarino conveys a contrast of how predicaments of grave danger can underscore the most tranquil of settings.

Washington perfectly conveys this sensibility, too, showcasing a massive range within this hour-and-forty-five-minute span. While he originally comes off as an aloof-though-still-charming shadow of his dad (again, I need to emphasize how all that opening exposition really dragged), he morphs into a complex man balancing painful sorrow, frightening confusion, and an awkward-but-competent sense of survival out of sheer necessity.

A scene early on in the third act perfectly propagates Washington’s ability to portray these convoluted emotions, as he recalls to Agent Tynan (Boyd Holbrook) his urge to revisit the site of the car crash. He admits that there wasn’t a concrete reason for his return as he wasn’t looking for a physical clue to explain the tragedy, but rather he was just trying to find some sense of mental clarity in order to assuage his own guilt. His otherwise charming demeanor and strong sense of determination suddenly crumbles, as his angry regret turns him into a tearful, stuttering mess.

Washington’s performance is a perfect fit for a film about wanting to do right amidst the cruelty of existence, and his supporting cast members echo this uncertainty with similar tactfulness. This also fits Beckett’s messy portrayal of politics and other societal events by revealing how many uncomfortable truths can coexist – some of which are not just uncomfortable, but downright disappointing.

Although that may also be Beckett’s stumbling block, as Filomarino and co-writer Kevin A. Rice end up resorting to a weird centrist-friendly morality. While the film’s revelations about Beckett’s pursuers and the overarching conspiracy acknowledge a slovenliness of some types of political action (as well as a noted lack of ideological glamor), the film seems comfortable in abandoning its burgeoning socioeconomic critique solely in favor of its core thriller mission. It’s not a fatally detrimental creative decision in Filomarino’s doing so – after all, Beckett’s later commitment to saving an innocent hostage seems to be the only way he thinks he can atone for April’s death – but it is an apolitical one that seems to place all former debate about it, regardless of alignment, into the pejorative, which undermines worthwhile discussions of leftist in-fighting, the financial corruption of state officials, and American interventionism on any sort of scale (the U.S. never met a foreign racket they didn’t love, eh?).

Ultimately, Beckett is a fine blend of American and European thriller sensibilities, meeting somewhere in-between Hollywood and heady art-house as a potent pressure cooker of paranoia. Filomarino creates an intriguing, action-packed study about the conflict of wanting to look back in regret when you really need to look forward toward survival, and Washington uses that struggle to turn in one of his most complex and physical performances to date. Despite its bumps in the road, this is definitely an excursion worth taking.

Rating: 7/10

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