I recently joined Jono Pech on his excellent podcast Comedy Rewind, which re-examines funny films from a "bygone era" and looks at how they hold up. Our topic was the classic British action-comedy Hot Fuzz. Listen here as we dissect the film in great depth.
Or you can read this blog. Or both.
Or you can read this blog. Or both.
Director: Edgar Wright.
Cast: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Dalton, Paddy Considine, Rafe Spall, Billie Whitelaw, Edward Woodward, Adam Buxton, Olivia Colman, Ron Cook, Kenneth Cranham, Peter Wight, Julia Deakin, Kevin Eldon, Paul Freeman, Karl Johnson, Lucy Punch, Anne Reid, David Threlfall, Stuart Wilson, Bill Bailey, Martin Freeman, Bill Nighy, Steve Coogan.
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| Detective Swan and his colleagues were in hot pursuit. |
Consider the lily.
Or, in the case of Edgar Wright's flawless comedy Hot Fuzz, consider specifically the Japanese peace lily.
This seemingly innocuous flowering plant is one example of the genius hidden in plain sight in Hot Fuzz's script, written by director Wright and star Simon Pegg. The film is remarkable in many ways, but the script is, to quote the script itself, "off the chain".
Like so many other things in Hot Fuzz, the lily is not just one thing; nothing in Hot Fuzz is only ever one thing. Almost every moment, object, joke, and line of dialogue does an incredible amount of heavy lifting, and the lily is a prime example. This is sharp writing that's especially rewarding for the audience, but also efficient, allowing more room for even more moments, objects, jokes and narrative elements, which is even more rewarding for the audience. It also enhances the film's rewatchability, which, again, is rewarding for the audience.
So let us consider the lily.
The first mention of the lily comes during a conversation between Nicholas Angel, played with wonderful balance by Pegg, and his ex Janine (a near-faceless cameo from Cate Blanchett). She calls it a rubber plant, he corrects her - a great show-don't-tell moment. The whole conversation is a mini-info-dump about their recent break-up, but we also learn Nicholas is pedantic, by the book, married to his job, and feels being right is important, both in broad terms of justice and the small-scale terms of a conversation. The lily correction is just one example, but a very key one, of Nicholas' character.
Soon after, we get the excellent high-speed montage of Nicholas moving to the country, which is made all the more amusing by Nicholas clinging to this lily. It also adds pathos - we start to care about Nicholas in part because he cares about the lily. It's kinda sad to see a grown man with no family, no friends, no pets, forced to relocate holding close his most treasured possession, which is a plant.
As Nicholas's relationship with his colleague Danny Butterman (Frost) grows, Nicholas tries to buy Danny a Japanese peace lily for his birthday. This coincides with a major plot point - while Nicholas is outside the nursery retrieving his notebook, Leslie the florist (Reid) is murdered, leading to a thrilling foot chase and Nicholas thinking he's closer to uncovering the murderer.
Now let's hone in on the plotting of this scene. It could have taken place anywhere. Nicholas could have bought something else for Danny - he knows of his love of action movies, so he could have bought him some DVDs or a poster or something connected to that passion. He knows Danny loves Cornettos - he could have bought a bulk supply of the ice creams. Both these ideas work, and the scene could have played out the same way, with Leslie running the local video shop or milk bar. Nothing changes to the plot, and the movie still works.
But the gift of the peace lily is far more personal, so it has far more impact, both when we see Nicholas ask if Leslie has any peace lilies, and later when he tells Danny what he was trying to purchase for him. This plant that had previously been a joke and a symbol of Nicholas' pedantry and loneliness becomes a symbol of what Danny is beginning to mean to Nicholas - a symbol of their blossoming friendship, if you will.
And later, when Nicholas fights for his life against Michael "Lurch" Armstrong in Nicholas' hotel room, the pot of the peace lily proves an effective and ironic weapon. It's almost a literal take on Chekhov's gun, which is the idea that if you show a gun in the first act, it has to go off in the second or third act.
More accurately, Chekhov's gun is a screenwriting principle which says that every element of the story must be necessary, and all irrelevant elements should be removed. And that's something Hot Fuzz adheres to, although it goes one better by making the necessary elements necessary for multiple reasons.
To wit: the simple act of doing a crossword is a clever comedic sketch, a portent of things to come, and eventually an opportunity for pithy action-movie one-liners. The model village is a stereotypically quaint (and vaguely hilarious) small-town tourist attraction, an ideal setting for a King Kong Vs Godzilla-style finale, and a wonderfully symbolic and foreshadowing narrative device - the darkness at the heart of Sandford comes from its residents' quest to be "a model village".
Wright and Pegg's script is filled with countless examples of this multi-layered thinking. Even "yarp" does heavy-lifting beyond its jokiness. It's initially a gag about inbred country folk, but later becomes used as a moment of tension important to the plot, followed by a great gag to release the tension ("narp?").
Similarly, the over-the-top nature of action movies is used as a joke that demonstrates the naivety of Danny in contrast to the seriousness of Nicholas, but also a bonding moment between the pair, a source of parody and comedy, and an opportunity for massive third-act action sequences.
This aspect of the film is also impressive - Hot Fuzz is simultaneously a spoof and loving homage of the action genre. It manages to somehow have its cake and eat it too.
As with Shaun Of The Dead's deep love of George Romero and zombie films, Wright and Pegg invest their own passion for the tropes and clichés of action movies, but send it up by being typically British about the whole thing. The pair reportedly watched 138 action films as research for writing Hot Fuzz - everything from Chuck Norris B-movies to classics like Dirty Harry and LA Confidential - but remained intent on infusing what they had seen with their own Englishness.
"There isn't really any tradition of cop films in the UK," Wright told the New York Post in 2007.
"We've got a lot of TV cop shows, but we wanted to make a cop film. We felt that every other country in the world had its own tradition of great cop action films and we had none."
The first draft of Hot Fuzz took nine months, and the re-writes stretched out for another nine months.
It shows - there's not a wasted moment in the film. It takes less than 10 minutes for the story to arrive in Sandford, by which point we understand who Nicholas Angel is, what the tone of the film is, the film's sense of humour, and the filmic language of exaggerated sound FX and sharp edits that it's using. Not to mention cameos from Cate Blanchett, Peter Jackson, Bill Nighy, Martin Freeman and Steve Coogan, amid a who's who cast of British comedy.
Hot Fuzz is an incredibly rare beast. It's a laugh-out-loud comedy that boasts one of the sharpest and best written scripts of any genre of the era. It's both a piss-take and a love letter. It's built on clichés and tired tropes yet it's something completely new and fresh. In short, Hot Fuzz is an unrepeatable masterpiece of both the buddy-cop action genre and the comedy genre.
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