Richard Shepard | The Matador / 2005

lifetime friends

by Douglas Messerli

 

Richard Shepard (screenwriter and director) The Matador / 2005

 

When I first suggested to friend Deborah Meadows what I was going to explore in this short essay,* she wondered if perhaps I had lost my mind. For I am now going to argue that the most truly “gay” movie I saw this year was The Matador, which does not outwardly portray any gay characters or even talk of them. Yet once I take up the role of a gay detective—a role any gay man of my generation was often forced to play—I cannot but think that this is story of a homoerotic relationship. Richard Shepard’s comedic crime-drama about a burned-out hit man and an everyday, family-loving salesman spins out a tale that reveals far more than what it says on its surface

  

     Danny Wright (played by Greg Kinnear) dearly loves his wife and obviously enjoys sex with her, but something has gone amiss in their relationship; their child has recently died, and his wife, Carolyn “Bean,” has a difficult time getting over it. Their home life is perhaps best represented by the events of the morning upon which her husband is about to embark on a sales trip to Mexico, as a tree comes crashing through their ceiling. If they have hinted to each other about their “bad luck,” the viewer now sees that something is rotten in Eden.

     Julian Noble (brilliantly played by Pierce Brosnan) has just blown up a car and its owner and is about to kill a businesswoman on the streets of Mexico City. Along the way he visits a brothel and has various other encounters; but it is quite clear that, despite his necessarily selfish and unfeeling life, he is lonely and desperate to find some way out.

      In the hotel bar where both Danny and Julian are staying, Julian strikes up a conversation:

 

Julian: Margaritas always taste better in Mexico.

Danny: Yes they do.

Julian: Margaritas and cock.

 

     Danny is slightly offended, asking his drinking companion if he’s serious, to which Julian quips, “I’m as serious as an erection problem.” As Danny turns to leave, Julian apologizes “Sorry about the cock thing, it’s kind of a conversation stopper.”

      So the two meet. Even had the male anatomy not been the subject of their conversation, one would still have to question what attracts Danny to Julian so quickly that he agrees to join him the next day at a bull fight. Anyone with even a smidgeon of understanding about male bonding would recognize that this is one of the most traditional of man-to-man pastimes—a trial of friendship Hemingway made quite famous. Julian’s announcement at the fight, moreover, that he is a hitman is almost the same as revealing to someone you’ve just met that you’re queer—a dangerous admission. Danny’s insistence that he “prove it” takes us into a symbolical sexual spin, which ends—as any gay detective knows it must—with a drunken Julian pounding upon Danny’s door late one night, begging to be let in like an apologizing lover. The film discreetly evades any opening of the door: we see Danny simply sitting alone on the hotel balcony in avoidance of the assault.

      After a large chunk of necessary plot, revealing the devolution of Julian in his murderous avocation, the viewer is awarded the inevitable continuation and conclusion of their homoerotic relationship, as Julian suddenly shows up at the door of the couple’s Denver home, again begging to gain entrance: “Danny, Danny with the large white fanny!”

     Julian is determined to stay the night, and Danny’s wife—as any intuitive woman might—recognizes there is something strange going on. Although Danny has shared almost everything with her, there is one incident he has not: what happened when he opened his bedroom door. Writer Shepard has Bean do what any woman would do in order to save her marriage: she flirts with the intruder. The dialogue is a hilarious concatenation of Freudian inferences:

 

Bean: Did you bring your gun?

Julian: Yes, as a matter of fact.

Bean: May I see it?

Julian: Really?

Bean: Yes, please.

 

    The two end up in a slow midnight dance, and a later whispered conversation with her husband reveals her understanding of the situation: “Aren’t we fucking cosmopolitan? Having a trained assassin stay overnight. Letting heartbreaking lies roll over us like a summer breeze.”

     Julian demands that Danny join him in a hit, or he will reveal what really happened between them that evening back in the hotel. Danny, it appears, has no choice but to join in. The good gay detective can only tell you that for a man of Danny’s moral fiber to join another man in a murder demands a deeper relationship between them than a simple encounter at the bar and a visit to a bull fight. But the movie takes the situation even further, suggesting that Danny not only helps in the murder that will free his friend from certain death, but commits the act. The fact that we learn what happened in that room was not a sexual act but a lapse of Danny’s moral commitment, a request that his friend make a “hit” on the buyer who’d refused his company the contract, hardly matters within the context in which I am writing. Danny’s temporary immorality is greeted by Julian’s refusal, “If I did it, you’d regret it instantly,” which we all know is what the gallant says to the eager woman willing to engage in illicit sex. Moreover, Julian’s statement creates a relationship between them that is perhaps every bit as strong as homosexual love: as Danny later admits to Julian, “You became my friend. You became my lifelong friend.” Meeting Mr. “Right,” Julian has displayed that he is truly “Noble.”

     In short, Shepard has created a stunning parable about what it means to be gay without literally engaging in the subject. I can well imagine that in most audiences those that have not had training in gay detection might not suspect a thing. For me, The Matador reveals more of gay life, portraying what attracts two men to form a relationship with one another, than Brokeback Mountain’s broodingly nervous cowboys.

 

*The original essay, “What Is a Gay Movie?” concerned my argument that I found The Matador, with no openly gay characters, to be more of a film about gay relationships than I perceived Brokeback Mountain to be.

 

Los Angeles, March 13, 2006

Reprinted from The New Review of Literature, Vol. 4, no. 1 (October 2006).