Die-hard Howard Marks fans and students will delight in this homage, but it’s one that assumes a little too much complicity.
In its simplest form, the biopic is a nifty little platform to explore the story of a strange or wonderful life. But it is often at its most ‘truthful’ when history is approximated, or at least subordinated to its subject’s spirit. Here, cinema becomes not just a mirror, but a kaleidoscope.
Mr. Nice, Bernard Rose’s biopic of infamous Welsh dope smuggler Howard Marks, is strongest in its moments of psychedelic cinematic dissent. When Rose pastes Marks into a green screen with original '70s backdrops, the effect is a self-conscious and nostalgic pastiche. It’s in these moments of lofted context – walking through a liberated London or smuggling drugs in a boat from Ireland – that both Marks’ story and the broader tale of the post-war zeitgeist can be told. In their absence, the film deflates.
At times it feels as if Mr. Nice is struggling with the same lack of identity as its protagonist, who adopted 43 aliases in his career as one of the world’s biggest dope dealers. Early cinematography veers towards the kind of haphazard mise-en-scène that works so well in ‘drug films’ like Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant. Later on, Rose evokes a more traditional heist aesthetic before finally lapsing into courtroom finger-wagging. These styles never really coalesce, and nor do they come to fruition on their own.
As Marks, go-to Welsh actor Rhys Ifans never has the chance to develop a chemistry with Luis Tosar’s DEA agent Lovato, who hunts him obsessively across the globe. Marks needs to be chased by Lovato to feed his seductive sense of rebellion, risking and losing his family in the process. But Rose doesn’t draw out that dynamic, preferring instead to focus on comic vignettes or Marks’ continent-hopping adventures.
And those adventures are intermittently fascinating considering the extent of Marks’ drug dealing connections, which came to include the likes of the IRA, the CIA, the Mafia and the British Secret Service. The film also explores some of the difficult realities of being an outlaw, not least its effects on family life and Marks’ relationship with wife Judy, played by a wobbly accented Chloë Sevigny.
Marks’ views on legalisation are all too apparent, though his relationship with IRA-affiliated terrorist Jim McCann – played with frightening and often comical, candour by David Thewlis – introduces a disquieting note. McCann’s erratic exploits save the story from its otherwise overly rosy, non-violent perspective of the drug world, and it’s a better film for Thewlis’ performance.
Mr. Nice isn’t a bad bit of renegade celluloid but it does leave you wishing it had the guts to be more radical in its opinions like the dissident at its core. As it is, it’s a breezy, freewheeling biopic that doesn’t really get under the skin of the issues at the heart of the narrative.
Rhys Ifans has his first lead role in the part he was born to play.
Great performances and intriguing style but it’s a shallow experience.
Die-hard Howard Marks fans and students will delight in this homage, but it’s one that assumes a little too much complicity.
