Review: Bullhead (2011)

Jacky is huge. A hulk of a man. Back muscles and shoulder muscles ripple and bulge as he shadow-boxes ferociously in the bathroom with sickly underwater-sea-green light, a room that is his private domain. Sometimes he climbs into the tub, curled up in a fetal position as the water pours in around his powerful body. Then, he goes to the little fridge against the wall, opens it up, takes out myriad small glass bottles, fills up a syringe with liquid, and plunges the needle into his ass cheek, his bicep, his hip.

Jacky lives and works on his family’s cattle farm in the Flemish area of Belgium. He grew up there. The first scene of Bullhead shows Jacky accosting another cattle farmer, threatening him with what will happen if he doesn’t trade exclusively with Jacky’s family. Jacky is so huge, his demeanor so menacing, that people recoil from him even before he does anything. It’s not just his body that is so intimidating. It’s the look on his face. A look of barely-managed rage. Whatever may have been his normal face once upon a time (and as the film goes on, you can see it there, more and more) has vanished. He keeps his head down, his eyes forward. Like an animal about to charge. When he walks, he emanates misery and repressed violence. He’s volatile. He’s drenched in testosterone and steroids.

Bullhead, written and directed by Michaël R. Roskam, was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film, and is based on a true story of a Belgian veterinarian who was murdered for continuing to check for hormones and illegal substances in the cattle he examined, despite being warned off by the “hormone mafia”. I had no idea there was such a thing as a hormone mafia, but of course, it makes total sense. Similar to doping in sports, doping animals to fatten them up is big big business, and there’s got to be a huge and international black market trading in such substances, substances that are undetectable in testing, and all the rest. That’s the complex world of Bullhead, and maybe it’s too complex, especially considering the fact that Jacky (played by powerhouse actor Matthias Schoenaerts) – and his psychological torment – takes over the film every time he walks onscreen. The study of this man, his ‘roid rage, his tortured psyche, his horrific past, his loneliness, his inability to speak about any of it, is the reason to see the film. It is not easy watching. At certain points, I yearned for it to be over. I yearned for him to be put out of his misery. Like a horse with a broken leg. Only one thing to do.

Surrounding Jacky are various dark forces, some of which he can sense, some of which he cannot. He knows something wonky is going on, but he can’t put his finger on it. There’s an ongoing police investigation into the murder of a cop who was tracking down the “hormone mafia.” The police have an informant on the inside, Diederik (Jeroen Perceval), who also – totally coincidentally – knew Jacky when they were kids, and was a witness to the traumatizing event (understatement. The event, shown in flashback, is, quite literally, unwatchable) that ruined Jacky’s life. Bullhead is crammed full of shady cattle dealers, sketchy hormone pushers selling their products in empty warehouses, impatient police officers. There are two hapless car mechanics put in charge of getting rid of a BMW (used as the getaway car in the murder) who completely screw it up. It’s all skillfully done, the film moody and bleak, with a color palette of greens and greys, as well as the tensions between the Flemish, the Belgians, the French-speakers, the Walloons, class issues, linguistic divides and borderlines that cannot be crossed culturally.

The thriller aspects of Bullhead are effective as well as interesting: it’s a whole sub-culture underworld never seen in film before that I’m aware of. But it’s what’s going on with Jacky – emotionally, physically – that really matters. It’s the only thing that matters. When the film shows what happened to him as a child, everything already seen in the film needs to be re-evaluated. In an instant, he becomes a toweringly tragic figure. (If you haven’t seen it, I would recommend avoiding other reviews that explain what happened to him when he was a child. I went into it not knowing anything and watching it unfold, not knowing what was coming, was part of the power of the film.)

Bullhead is such a harrowing portrait of what it means to be a man, of what masculinity means, of what it means when a man feels unable to access masculinity in a meaningful or lasting way, that it deserves to stand toe to toe with other similar portraits like Taxi Driver or Raging Bull.

I cannot say enough good things about Schoenaerts’ performance. He actually made me cry. I couldn’t believe that the character I saw in the first half hour of the film could make me cry, because I’m pretty tapped out in feeling sorry for men who don’t know how to express their feelings. My response to Jacky went way beyond “feeling sorry.” My response was a cry of pain for him, a desperate scrabbling for some kind of relief for this poor man, someone to understand, to at least say, “I get it. It is totally unfair what has happened to you.” But even if that were to happen, Jacky’s reaction to any topic that even comes close to that tender spot inside of him, is to flip out, punch a wall, get wasted, beat someone up. The damage to Jacky is so total that Bullhead is extremely difficult viewing.

There are those who prefer movies that provide a glimmer of hope. Well, that’s fine for some movies. But Bullhead is, above all else, a psychological study of a man haunted by a trauma in his past, a trauma that changed the entire course of his life. And Schoenaerts is so deeply immersed in the role of Jacky that he is basically unrecognizable, especially the expression on his face, deadened-eyes showing almost otherworldly endurance as well as scanning the landscape for threats, itching for a fight, his arms hunched at his sides as he walks, looking as though even walking is too vulnerable an act for him, because surely everyone sees, surely everyone knows what happened to him, surely everyone knows what it is like for him inside. And that he cannot bear.

There was another witness to the traumatizing event in his childhood. A girl. And the look on her face back then – sad and horrified – stuck with him. He has kept track of her ever since, sitting in a car outside the perfume shop she owns. The scene in the perfume shop, when he finally gets up the courage to go in, is a masterpiece. It comes so late in the game, and you’re so familiar with Jacky’s life by that point, and who he is, that seeing him in this delicate and girlie space is almost as unwatchable as the childhood trauma. It’s a totally foreign environment for him, and he has to adjust himself to seem gentle, to even try to smile. He has to deal with another person on equal ground instead of as a battering ram. And she’s a woman. There are no women in his life, except for his family members. All of this takes a mighty effort. To even say his name to her when she makes out his sales slip is difficult for him because he wonders if she might recognize his name.

He follows her to a nightclub, with throbbing dance music, pretty girls in short skirts, a high-end crowd. You have to wear a proper shirt to enter and when Jacky tries to pass by the bouncer, they stop him. He’s wearing a T-shirt. He can rent a shirt from them for 5 euros or whatever. He had no idea that this was how things were. He’s a farmer. There’s a language barrier there too. Everyone knows he’s not a French-speaker, everyone knows he’s not really “supposed” to be there. Jacky is a fish out of water, again, but he wants to go inside so he pays the money to buy a shirt from the nightclub. He galumphs through the gyrating dance floor, standing on a chair to scan the crowd, see if he can see her.

At one point, and this was when the brilliance of this performance really struck me – like a bolt of lightning, I literally got goosebumps: he stands by himself with two glasses of vodka, gulping them down, liquid courage. He’s clocked where she is, laughing with friends at the end of the bar. He keeps his eye on her. He feels his alone-ness and out of place-ness acutely. He feels that everyone can see everything about him, including the fact that he has no idea what he’s doing, has never been in a nightclub, has a huge crush on that girl over there, probably everyone can see his trauma, his masculinity problems. He is stripped bare and he doesn’t know what to do with himself, so, for about 2 seconds, he pretends to groove with the dance music. Just in case anyone’s watching. Just in case anyone is looking at him and thinking, “Look at that sad guy all by himself crushing on a girl who doesn’t know he exists.” When of course nobody is thinking about him at all. Or if they ARE thinking about him, they are thinking, “Okay, that guy looks fucking scary.” In his vulnerability, in his desire to look like he should be there, to look like he is part of the human race – from which he feels forever banished – he pretends to dance.

It’s one of the most tragic things I’ve ever seen. I re-wound the moment 5 times.

Vulnerability like that – and inventive psychological bits of business – is what Schoenaerts brings to the table. He’s such a huge guy, 6’2″, and his body is massive. His vulnerability is startling. It’s what makes him a natural movie star. He often plays guys bound up in their own pain, in their muscles and physical prowess, unable to speak of what’s happening with them. He often plays blue-collar guys intimidated by and ignored by the white-collar world, the kind of guy you’d write off as a thug with one glance. I have huge affection for his performance in Rust and Bone (a great film, one of the best of that year), and there – he plays a big KID, a messy careless sometimes-cruel guy, where you know that he’s actually a good person, somewhere, he just needs to grow up and take responsibility for who he is in the world. In Rust and Bone, he plays a boxer, another guy obsessed with his body, always in movement, jogging, and training, and swimming, and fucking. But there’s a light in his eyes. A light of curiosity, humor, and then … finally … kindness. Always there but it needed encouragement to come on out and express itself. That’s part of growing up, part of being a man.

In Bullhead, just one year earlier, Schoenaerts takes the light in his eyes … and snuffs it out.

It’s a tremendous performance.