"The Guilty" Review
In the vein of films like Phone Booth, Locke, and The Call, Danish film The Guilty from director Gustav Möller is a one-location thriller set in a 911 call center, relying almost entirely on one on-screen performance. From what I understand the film is quite good, so good that Jake Gyllenhaal sought out and acquired the rights to make and star in an English-language remake of the same title, directed by Antione Fuqua, which would then be acquired by Netflix for $30 million dollars. While I have not seen the original, I have seen the remake, and I'm fairly certain I've seen the far inferior version.
The set up of this movie is both its greatest strength and its biggest weakness. On one hand, a movie of this structure is inherently intriguing if only to see how they can compellingly pull off the magic trick of a movie made up almost entirely of phone calls. On the other hand, your central character has to be engaging enough to make looking solely at them for over an hour bearable. Personally, I've loved Jake Gyllenhaal for a while now and will usually watch something he's in just to watch him act. He gives fully embodied performances like few else and all over the genre spectrum, from Prisoners to John Mulaney & The Sack Lunch Bunch. Thankfully, he's not really the problem here, although he does little to help.
What makes so much of this movie fail is the written characterization of Joe Baylor, an ambiguously disgraced cop who's been demoted to the 911 call desk. Joe is, to put it lightly, not a good person, and it’s not always clear he’s trying to be. Is he working towards a commendable goal? Yes. Is he incessantly rude to his coworkers while doing it? Yes. At every step of his journey, Joe has no regard for others at his job even before he gets the call at the center of the film, and frequently brushes others aside to pursue his own course of action. There are plenty of films in which the protagonist are undeniably horrible far beyond Joe Baylor, even amazing films specifically about bad cops like Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder. However, due to Gyllenhaal being in 100% of this film that is told in real time, we never get a break from being inundated with Jake Gyllenhaal sweatily cursing at and chastising not only his coworkers, but regular people who call 911 looking for help.
(Major spoilers and TW for police violence in the following paragraphs)
This comes to a boil when it’s ultimately revealed that Joe murdered a young boy while in uniform, and is currently facing pending manslaughter charges and an upcoming trial. I should make clear that The Guilty is very much set in our reality. Raging forest fires plague California, and anti-police protests are alluded to in news footage. Thus, the film in its final moments decides to enter the very real dialogue about the role of police and how we react to police brutality. While the film ends with Jake Gyllenhaal explicitly deciding to face punishment for his crimes and that we should not be sympathetic towards him for his crime, we must also question what the film is suggesting by framing this heroic narrative around such a character.
The film, while not making any direct value assessments of Baylor as a person, spends its runtime endearing us to him. We feel bad for him because he can't see his daughter, because he gets calls that waste his time, because he is trying to do the right thing but the system keeps getting in the way. Fellow officers tell him he's done good, that "broken people help broken people." However, the only person to truly seem to understand how broken Joe Baylor is, is Joe Baylor. When asked why he killed the boy, he answers that he wanted to, he felt he needed to punish him. Joe sobs through these words, he feels bad. However, why should we feel bad for Joe, despite the film and Gyllenhaal's performance insisting? Joe has unjustly taken a life, and even in his demoted role bucks authority and proper procedure at every turn. What has Joe learned in any of this? When killing the boy, in an emotional state he felt he could do whatever he wanted if he felt it was right. Now we see him follow the same line of thinking, only this time he is rewarded; the day is saved. We see a department surrounding him who is aware of his crimes, but is happy to see him remain in law enforcement and is lenient when he bends the rules. Even his partner who witnessed the murder plans on lying under oath to protect his friend from jail time. Despite how emotionally it’s presented, this is a system that is broken and mirrors reality in more ways than it seems to recognize.
We also must talk about the use of Joe Baylor as a perpetrator of police brutality as a plot device. I know Joe Baylor's name, the name of his ex-wife Jess, his partner Rick, his desk-mate Manny, and the names of everybody involved in the call. I do not know, however, the name of the boy Joe Baylor killed. While police brutality is something the film hints at being interested in a couple of times, within the context of the narrative this unnamed 19-year-old is no more than a blip in the script to be brought up in the last fifteen minutes. He is only relevant as he pertains to Joe's emotional state and the criminal charges he may face. He may never have been brought up at all if not for Joe trying to talk Emily off a ledge. Police killing undeserving civilians, particularly Black civilians, is a real issue, and one that if explored unsuccessfully is better left out of a film more concerned with its narrative framing than ideas of racial and criminal justice.
One could argue that this is meant to be a portrayal of one such killer cop, and the broken mental and emotional state one must be in to get to that point. To that I rebut that while I agree that Fuqua thinks he has done that, he ultimately fails because it does not feel like the film is portraying anybody real. In reality, officers who unlawfully kill teenagers do not turn themselves in, or tell an honest portrayal of their story to the news. Gyllenhaal and Fuqua create the fictional, remorseful killer cop, and thus create a fake justification for why we are meant to sympathize with such a character, a stand in for those real life cops who find themselves in a similar situation. While I'm unaware of the police's relation to the public in Denmark, I am now infinitely more curious how the original film handles this plot element.
(Spoilers and TW end here)
Often in remakes of foreign films some things are lost in translation, whether that be cultural elements or political critiques, likely because those remaking it do not like it for the reasons it is actually interesting or understand the original’s cultural context. Ultimately, it doesn't matter to me how well Gyllenhaal embodied Joe Baylor (fairly well), how his disembodied costars sell the drama of the situation over the phone (it varies), or how well Fuqua pulls of the non-traditional framing of the film (okay, I guess). By choosing to remake this film, to tell this character's story in this way, with such little regard for the reality of the story or interest in telling it in a nuanced way, it seems The Guilty may have been doomed from the start.