‘44 Inch Chest’

Writer-playwrights Louis Mellis and David Scinto have a way with deconstructing masculine ferociousness -- relishing in revealing the follies of machismo in extremis.

First, with “Sexy Beast,” in which Ray Winstone played a retired gangster living in luxury when a surpassingly menacing, insinuating Ben Kingsley descends upon him.

And now with “44 Inch Chest,” again starring Winstone, who this time plays rugged, burly, middle-aged Colin, whose stunning wife of 21 years (Joanne Whalley) announces that she no longer loves him and is leaving him for another man. Colin instantly becomes a veritable Othello, a working-class man whose love for his wife is profound. He alternates from extolling the depth of his love for her to cursing the excruciating pain she has dealt him to roiling with rage.

He is stretched out, immobile on the floor of his wrecked living room in suburban London, when his longtime pals discover him. Led by a nasty male supremacist, Old Man Peanut (John Hurt), they urge him to seek revenge, kidnapping his wife’s young lover (Melvil Poupaud), holding him in an abandoned ancient house in a dark London street and egging on the numbed Colin to kill the captive as a way of restoring his sense of manhood.

The dim Mal (Stephen Dillane) and Archie (Tom Wilkinson), who still lives with his mother, are easily manipulated by the fire-and-brimstone harangues of Peanut, while Ian McShane’s Meredith, a wealthy gay, seems a mischievous observer.

Malcolm Venville, in an assured directorial debut, builds suspense with steady effectiveness. Much of “44 Inch Chest” is highly theatrical, yet the way in which Venville and the writers deftly use flashback and fantasy, plus the film’s overall sense of control and pace, yields an understated, graceful sense of the cinematic.

“44 Inch Chest” is blessed with Mellis and Scinto’s corrosive yet at times soaringly poetic language and splendid, nuanced portrayals so typical of the Brits. Winstone scales the heights and plumbs the depths of Colin’s emotions in a role of Shakespearean grandeur.

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