it’s a shame, isn’t it, that I couldn’t remain helpless
the beguiled
The Beguiled (Sofia Coppola, 2017)1
Colin Farrell is good at playing men whose ability to skate by on charm has just run out. They haven’t always figured this fact out yet. They hang in the air where their charm used to support them. Then they look down.2 Such is the case for his character in In Bruges (2008), for instance, who has gotten himself into the sort of trouble nothing—not his winsome smile, not his puzzled eyebrows, not his puppy-dog eyes—can get him out of. In his case, though, he knows it. The charm is just an old habit he doesn’t know how to switch off.
Corporal John McBurney, Farrell’s character in The Beguiled—an unlucky Irish immigrant who has ended up a wounded Union soldier in Confederate territory—also runs up against the limits of his charm, but he doesn’t find this out until it’s too late. He sweet-talks his way into safety at…