Bullhead, or: When a director is more stubborn than his main character

Bullhead (2011)

Directed by Michael R. Roskam

***SPOILERS***

There’s something to be said for a film that calls itself Tyrannosaur. Joseph, the center of the film, very much resembles the extinct king of dinosaurs in his pure rage and hardheadedness. Looking at the bare essentials of the film, it instantly recalls Animal Kingdom in its arcing theme regarding the animal kingdom and survival of the fittest. Animal Kingdom writer and director David Michôd showed crafted (despite his shaky execution) a narrative that embodied this grisly theme, choosing to have his characters make up the various components of the food chain and allow them to adapt. It also displayed how misguided writer and director Paddy Considine was with Tyrannosaur, where simple and blatant references to animals were meant to serve the same function an arcing metaphor, which wouldn’t have been so detrimental if the characters had come to embody those references. But to Considine’s credit, he certainly showed he could someday craft something great, displaying astute attention to caring for his characters and their situations—however poorly he integrated them into his metaphor. The “survival of the fittest” message wasn’t the selling point, but branding his ending with a speech regarding such an encompassing metaphor, it’s clear Considine wanted to do more with Tyrannosaur than just portray a bleak, kitchen-sink view of England.

Likewise, there’s something to be said for a film that calls itself Bullhead. Where Considine is actually able to show restraint in his directorial debut, writer and director Michael R. Roskam shows anything but. Considine is competent enough to offset the gruesome surface image of Joseph in a speech he makes about his wife, who would call him a “tyrannosaur”. It comes in an unexpected moment of confession, not manufactured or maliciously placed, but instead wholly relevant to Hannah’s situation and revealing of Joseph's tragic flaw. Roskam seems to be heading in a similar direction with his main character Jacky (Matthias Schoenaerts), revealing his steroid ridden lifestyle to be the result of his castration as a child. This is supposed to explain Jacky’s rage issues, which innately lends sympathy to such a seemingly inexorable man. But for Roskam—and for many filmmakers exploring this theme, it seems—making a metaphorical connection between humans and animals just isn’t enough (when it's already too much). Instead of even attempting to integrate such a theme, Roskam shows even more ineptitude than Considine by making it resolutely one-note. The flaw doesn’t lie in the placement of such a metaphor or its role in Jacky’s life, but instead how it deconstructs (or fails to deconstruct), only serving to make Jacky more and more heartbreaking as the movie builds, and never accommodating to the theme, or any of the surrounding characters, or the crime drama at hand, or—most disconcertingly—the most poignant relationship in the film.

Of course I’m speaking of the delayed friendship between Jacky and Diederik (Jeroen Perceval). A friendship, I might add, that has little to no relation with Roskam’s underlying theme. Unlike the misguided, poorly constructed, strangely layered crime drama at hand, Jacky and Diederik’s relationship lends itself towards Jacky’s depressing situation, since they’re each intrinsically connected to Jacky’s ball-bashing episode. What drives them apart is an unspeakable horror that plagues their childhood, and the tragic distance between the two isn't the result of bullheadedness, but instead an honest relation of childhood peril that can’t quite be overcome. It’s the deconstruction that disallows such a relationship to blossom, and it all stems back to Jacky’s connection with the bulls that conveniently flood his profession. It’s a connection that’s made quite apparent (in case, you know, you we'rent watching the movie), and such intransigence in relaying Jacky’s debilitating fault essentially kills the gripping nature of his castration. Jacky is a tragic character without interference, and immersing the viewer in such a lifestyle is key—but not in the way Roskam does it.

Every establishing shot and moment of revelation is building towards painting Jacky as a doomed figure, but never once does Roskam allow it to connect with interspersed storylines and relationships (unlike Tyrannosaur), instead choosing to allow the purely catastrophic nature surrounding Jacky to dictate action and set the mood. Roskam is quite adept in framing a shot, and even more so in his establishing shots, each focused adamantly on an image—whether a lone tree in a field or a red-hot heater in Jacky’s apartment—that properly relays the bleak atmosphere at hand. But such bleakness entirely stems from Jacky’s inability to cope with castration, lending no emotional weight to the slightly less-than-interesting crime investigation or the broken childhood relationship between him and Diederik.

Roskam could have remedied this problem by integrating this bullhead’s dire predicament into the accompanying storylines, which he does admirably sometimes, but for the most part lazily allows a looming sense of tragedy to dictate the mood. This bullheaded metaphor has literally nothing to do with the investigation at hand, with little or no attempt to convey the animalistic connections to Jacky’s problem, such as power struggles, coping with inborn anger, or gender roles in society. None of this is essential for a bleak tale of loss and regret, but for a director so rigidly attached to his central theme, such an encompassing dilemma for Jacky should encompass the film. Let’s not pretend that Diederik—despite taking up nearly as much screen time—holds as much importance in this story as Jacky. His attachment to the investigation entirely stems from this traumatic childhood experience, which is unfortunately and unavoidably attached to Jacky. Jacky, however, very much exists in Bullhead as a tragic figure without Diederik’s help, and once again dictates the aura of inevitable doom surrounding the investigation. The only legitimate argument to be made in Roskam's defense would be Jacky's profession, which is directly linked to the bulls he's so comparable to, and it's also directly linked to the investigation. It's a moment of subtlety that doesn't hinder Bullhead, but it ultimately means nothing, instead serving more as an relevant factor in forming the dramatic crime narrative. The bulls are more useful as pieces of imagery than serving as metaphors, and their unmentioned role in the film serves as a welcome moment of restraint, which, adversely, is what killed Tyrannosaur.

Even when Roskam has found a legitimate means of connecting the central theme, he alternately shows his inability to connect the various storylines. Jacky’s relationship with Lucia (Jeanne Dandoy) blossoms late in this tale, but holds a level of relevance that doesn’t exist between Jacky and Diederik or the crime investigation at hand. When Jacky walks away disgruntledly from a brothel early in the film, we find him returning home and pumping himself with drugs. It’s this disconnect from the opposite gender that captures the tragedy of his condition without making it glaringly obvious. But more important is its function within the story, as there’s now a relationship that’s emotionally connected with Roskam’s motif. In a less stubborn film, this relationship would have had more room to develop, but as it is in Bullhead, it’s a cataclysmic moment of pure anguish on Jacky’s part. And the anguish doesn’t stem from Roskam’s own bullheadedness in relating Jacky’s bullheadedness, but instead an inescapable flaw in Jacky’s life that actually takes shape and gives Lucia a relevant place in this film. Basking in this doomed relationship serves more purpose in relating Jacky’s troubles than the forced trauma candidly ignited in scenes connected with Jacky’s drug ring, which all stems back towards painting Jacky as a lost soul with no hope…instead of, you know, just allowing him to be.

But as seen consistently throughout the film, his relationship with Lucia—while never misguided—is entirely misplaced in this messy narrative, which alternates freely between irrelevant moments where detectives question Bullhead’s comic relief characters and unnecessary, elongated flashbacks to Jacky’s childhood. At this point, Roskam is just piling on the crippling goods in an attempt to make Bullhead as bleak as fucking possible, never utilizing subtlety or allowing an natural sense of tragedy to loom. Roskam’s genius moment with Lucia proves to be useless as she and Jacky’s demise integrates with the investigation at hand, culminating in a moment where Jacky attempts to commit suicide with the very drugs that made him a tragic figure. As it all comes together in the film’s final moments, we see the ultimate climax in narrative, but the austere ambiance is entirely dictated by Jacky’s attachment to drugs (and bulls?), which itself owns no connection to the harmonized storylines. Bullhead is comparable to Tyrannosaur in its desire to convey something deeper, but unlike Considine’s film in its ability to establish such a concept in surrounding storylines, making for a film that knows exactly where it wants to go…but has no idea how to get there.