The Forgiven is based on the novel by Lawrence Osborne and stars Ralph Fiennes (terrific) and Jessica Chastain (ditto) as a wealthy British-American couple driving to a weekend-long party in a luxurious Moroccan desert villa when they hit and kill a young local boy on the road. Oops. What the film adds up to, I cannot say, as it isn’t clear. Who is forgiven? Is anybody? It’s ethically ambiguous and you have to do your own moralising, which is always a drag. (Note to filmmakers: I’m old, I’m tired, please spoon-feed me.) But it’s a compelling, tense journey even if it’s a pitiless one. Human nature doesn’t come out of this at all well.
He has only one redeeming quality and that’s his taste in linen shirts
The film has been adapted by John Michael McDonagh (The Guard, Calvary), who also directs. The main characters are David Henninger, a doctor, and his wife, Jo (Chastain). We first meet them as they arrive in Tangiers by boat. They are fractiously bickering from the off, are wholly unsympathetic, and you will hate them on sight. He’s the sort of man who wears perforated driving gloves and doesn’t have a nice thing to say about anybody or anything. He calls Muslims ‘towel heads’ and even a spectacular view can’t win him over: ‘Quite picturesque… in a banal way.’ He has only one redeeming quality and that’s his taste in linen shirts. He has a few of those and they are all quite lovely.
He’s an alcoholic and has put away a bottle of wine when they set out for the last leg of their journey in a hire car. He accidentally hits a boy who was out on the road selling fossils to tourists.
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