The Forgiven Review: Literary Drama Abandons Its Most Compelling Trait

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The Forgiven is a thematically ambitious film, something that plays in its favor while watching and becomes a point of criticism in retrospect. It positions its characters as sitting on a number of axes of difference — gender, sexuality, nationality, class, religion, age — that can at any point step in and determine how they relate to one another. Power imbalances are problematized, prejudices are aired, and the world is presented as a place defined by jagged edges that refuse to be sanded down. This makes for a compelling backdrop to a tense crime drama narrative that is fueled by gaps of knowledge the movie seems in no hurry to fill. As long as those gaps remain, they give space for small details to echo with meaning, but the impulse to resolve the story by its end diminishes its opportunity for impact. Given some time to think on it later, viewers might have trouble pinning down what it actually had to say about all those thorny subjects it seemed to be about.

Writer-director John Michael McDonagh's The Forgiven opens with two story strands that collide to leave the mess that ends up defining the film. In the first, wealthy couple David (Ralph Fiennes) and Jo (Jessica Chastain) travel through Morocco on their way to a weekend-long party hosted by friends Richard (Matt Smith) and Dally (Caleb Landry Jones). They bicker and drink, and end up having to drive through a barely marked desert road at night. In the second, two young Moroccan men, disillusioned with their lives digging for fossils to sell, determine to take more drastic action against the rich foreigners they know are convening at the noted gay couple's estate. In talking his friend into whatever they've planned, one of them flashes a revolver. David and Jo,