This is by no means a flawless film, the ending is botched for a start, but it is a very, very good one and some things about it are very good. It was written by the guys who wrote Sexy Beast and a few of the stars from that reappear here; so that was my initial point of reference as a viewer. And it remains so, this could almost be a companion piece to that film. If you strip Sexy Beast down to its bare essentials it is a story from within a relationship of the bond between two people holding them together and sustaining them. 44 Inch Chest is the opposite, it is an objective look at the destruction of a relationship and the impact of that upon the people therein.
The fulcrum of the film is Ray Winstone as the cuckolded husband Colin. He gives a tremendous performance; his bloated visage- all pupils and perplexity- tells of a struggle to comprehend what is happening to him and the utter loss of certainty about how to respond. Casting Winstone was an excellent move since he brings with him a resonance and an aura, his hard-man reputation precedes him and is cleverly pivoted here. The key theme within the film is the emasculation that comes with a marriage breakdown. How should a man react when he his wife leaves him for someone else? Everything in the film echoes this, most clearly the references to Samson and Delilah, but also in the four supporting actors who each advocate a different reaction and almost represents differing types of man. The four men represent the embodiment of Colin's confusion by being very distinct (and therefore one-dimensional) stereotypes: the mother's boy, the sexual predator, the verbal aggressor all mouth and no trousers, the glib youngster.
The performances of the four supports are key in this respect, they need to inflate the persona without slipping into caricature; to remain one-dimensional and yet convincing. All four do a great job- especially John Hurt who stays just the right side of self-parody throughout. Each in turn speaks to Colin and influences his thoughts, just as his mood changes with his own internal struggles and he slips between fantasy and reality.
The difficulty the film has is in sustaining the tension whilst revealing nothing of the backstory. We need to care what happens when we don't know who is 'right' in the dispute. Colin talks with great emphasis about being too good a husband and of loving her too much, in his recollection he arrives home with chocolates and a bouquet of flowers as if this happens every day. And yet the only scenes in which we see them together, she is cold and brutally vindictive and he beats the shit out of her. It's difficult to maintain intensity in a film where the viewer can be nothing other than impartial. In addition to this, the stagey setting and dialogue-heavy script create a narrative with no natural punctuation marks and the flashbacks which should serve to release the tension before it commences again are far too intense to do so. Eventually white-knuckle fatigue sets in and the viewer becomes more distant.
Perhaps this is why the ending fails; that lack of empathy or immediacy. The 'doing the right thing' and 'being the bigger man and walking away' message- if that was the intention- is lost in the confusion. Colin could equally have walked away as he believed- as he said at one point- it was his only hope of winning his wife back. It's a real shame that the climax is confused (not ambiguous, confused).
By turns 44 Inch Chest can be funny, gripping, thought-provoking and very, very sad. The performances are excellent throughout, as is the swearing. Even the title, with it's twin suggestion of a pneumatically enhanced hyper-feminine woman or else the a puffed-up bravado of a man is superb. And the dialogue referencing the gender-roles of the husband and wife sparkles: "It's your fault, look how feminine you've been", "A woman swearing- it's unbecoming", "He'll do it, he's a man. He just needs time". I thought it was great.
