In one of several brilliantly-written scenes in Shane Meadows’ (of the 2006 skinhead drama This is England fame) Dead Man’s Shoes (2004), a small-time drug dealer Sonny (Gary Stretch) and his gang accost a local guy Richard (Paddy Considine), who has just returned to the British Midlands after serving the army. Sonny is suspicious that the previous night Richard had broken into his house. The tête-à-tête between them goes something like this: Sonny: ‘You know the lads had this ridiculous idea th…’ Richard (interrupting): ‘Yeah, it was me.’ The abrupt cutting off in mid-sentence and the instantaneous confession take both Sonny and us, the viewer, completely aback.
In a sense, this short, but impactful scene encapsulates the film itself. Most of us, while reading the above verbal exchange might have formed a mental picture of Richard, the ex-army man, and Sonny, the drug dealer. Fed on the staple Hollywood diet of hard-as-nails, biceps-bulging soldiers and gun-toting villainous drug lords, the characters of Richard and Sonny in Dead Man’s Shoes are as different from the stereotypical portrayal of similar characters by Hollywood, as the astonishing repartee by Richard to Sonny’s half-asked question. Moreover, the confidence Richard shows in confessing does not stem from the power he feels in his muscles, but from his knowledge that deep-down Sonny and his crew of drug peddlers—Tuff (Paul Sadot), Soz (Neil Bell), Big Al (Seamus O’Neill), Herbie (Stuart Wolfenden), and Gypsy John (George Newton)—are a bunch of cowards.
The story of Dead Man’s Shoes, written by Meadows and Considine themselves, deals with the age-old theme of revenge. Richard’s mentally-challenged brother Anthony (Toby Kebbell) was abused, humiliated, and tortured—both physically and mentally—by Sonny and his cohorts, while Richard was away serving the army. Now, that he is back, Richard seeks retribution for the wrongs done to his brother, who was too weak-minded to fight back.
Straightforward, the story may seem, but run-of-the-mill, it is not. In the opening monologue itself, when Richard says ‘God will forgive them. He’ll forgive them and allow them into heaven. I can’t live with that’, we realise that our protagonist is not like his American ilk from the Marines or Special Forces, who have god-like powers and prowess. So, is he the devil, then, as Soz enquires when he comes face-to-face with Richard? The answer, this, time, too, is in the negative. Richard is simply a man consumed with the single motivation to right the wrong done to his helpless little brother. Later on, though, we get to learn what is stoking the slow-burning fire of vengeance inside him has a lot to do with Richard himself, which makes the character all the more humane.
On the other side of the coin lie Sonny and his gang. While their corrupting influence on Anthony revealed a malevolent and immoral streak, but like Richard, it does not take us long to see through this veneer. Just as Richard is anything but the personification of the ‘one-man-army’, these small-time drug dealers, too, are nothing but scared little ferrets inside. After all, bullying is but a façade behind which hide the weak.
Richard is well aware that Sonny and his gang feed on others’ fears, and that they would crumple like the powder and pills they ply as soon as they are confronted with an individual who can stand up to them. And it is this very weapon—striking fear in the hearts of those whose business thrives on that particular emotion—that Richard uses in avenging his brother’s brutalisation.
Sonny and Co. are quite similar to Anthony in the sense that they are nothing more than a bunch of overgrown children. This facet becomes all the more clear over the five-day period during which Richard strikes terror into the lives of Sonny, Soz, Tuff, Herbie, Al, and Gypsy John. Be it scaring the living daylights out of Herbie by appearing in front of him while donning an army gas mask or generating a frenzy of fright among the entire group by breaking into Sonny’s apartment and leaving behind a ‘colourful’ message of warning, Richard relegates the outwardly tough drug dealers into a group of crying, bumbling, panic-stricken collection of cry-babies, who refuse to be left alone even for a second.
Unlike most revenge-films that focus more on the final culminating act of virile violence, Dead Man’s Shoes derives its message from the drugs that wreaked havoc on Anthony’s life. Richard believes that by peddling drugs to the youth, the dealers control their minds. And to teach these dealers of death a lesson or two, he turns the tables on them by doing exactly that—meddling with their minds first before delivering fatal blows. In fact, he had carved this philosophy on the wall when he had sneaked into Tuff and Soz’s apartment. The graffiti ‘Cheyne Stoking’ that he had spray painted on the wall denotes a breathing pattern in terminally ill patients that acts as harbinger of impending death.
Richard decided to turn every breath taken by Sonny and his band of miscreants into a poisonous inhalation—a fact made all the more ominous by the gas mask he wears. A vérité vengeance, indeed!
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