TOO OLD TO DIE YOUNG: A Bold and Cruel Chronicle of Decline

The Neon Demon was like a psychedelic hallucination — Too Old To Die Young feels like the day after a drug-fueled party. Stoned, slow, acid-tinged, mired in stagnation. A hangover after the revelry, a moral nausea, a void left by the madness. The collaborative work of Nicolas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker takes no prisoners—there is no middle ground, only extreme opinions.

In all the negative reviews of Too Old To Die Young one finds the most foolish criticism possible of any film: that it is boring.

But whose fault is that, really? The creators’ or the critic’s, who lacks the patience to give the work its due attention? Boredom is a relative concept. For some, the slow pace of this trance-like gangster saga will prove deadly—but others (myself included) will edge closer to the edge of their seats with each passing episode, hypnotized by the story’s meditative rhythm. Refn treats boredom as a stylistic device—yes, he overuses it at times, but this stillness creates tension and generates an undercurrent of unease.

It is like the calm before the storm, lulling the viewer’s vigilance before sudden bursts of violence and action (the old, good Sergio Leone school) and before the occasional drops of irony and black humor that pepper the whole.

Boredom also responds to the overstimulation of the modern world; the creators serve us an anti-blockbuster and an anti-Internet, forcing us to focus on only one open browser tab.

No one expects a story about cops, gangsters, and killers to deliver such doses of silence; the director turns his back on making such people pop-culture heroes, showing them in their least spectacular, most uncinematic moments. The series paces itself unhurriedly also to captivate us with its beauty; out of rightful artistic vanity, the creators flaunt exquisite compositions and eye-pleasing color palettes. Every frame deserves a frame of its own, and even the staunchest detractors must appreciate Cliff Martinez’s score. Above all, though, boredom in the series embodies the emptiness that devours the characters—internally dead, indifferent, amoral, consumed by emotional atrophy, reciting their lines with the zeal of someone in catatonia.

Their entire world is in a state of catatonia.

Too Old To Die Young is a cruel chronicle of decline—of the decline of culture, morality, artistic potency, masculinity, everything. It is a somber series. This is no longer even a dark morality play about downfall. It is a portrait of a world that fell long ago, where the stench of rotting corpses hangs in the air. It is a world that has overdosed. Its temperament is decisively closer to the hidden wounds of Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love than to Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The god of this rotten world is Jesus (Augusto Aguilera), prince of a Mexican cartel, born not of the Virgin Mary but of the sinner Magdalene.

In vengeance for her death he kills a policeman, witnessed by the other officer—Martin (Miles Teller), a strange, enigmatic man with a stony face, evoking the Driver from Drive. This event turns Martin into a contract killer.

We do not know what drives him—depression, burnout, or perhaps psychopathy? His inner life is a mystery; his existence is chance. Fate and successive assignments lead Martin (and the viewer) through the lowest circles of hell, and the entire series becomes a ghastly catalogue of sadism and repulsiveness.

Along the way, Martin encounters every kind of scum and gangster: brothers specializing in filming pornographic rape scenes and an obscene father (William Baldwin), whose love for his daughter borders on sexual obsession. Remarkably, the most sympathetic characters in this mire are the serial killer Viggo (John Hawkes) and his client Diana (Jena Malone), who hunts pedophiles. All these threads interweave in a specific way, and, contrary to appearances, the whole series is a carefully constructed puzzle that breaks the classic rules of narrative (see the ending that defies expectations).

The world of Too Old To Die Young is inhabited not by people but by archetypes, instincts, and urges that drive impassive, passive puppets clad in human skin.

The Neon Demon was a fairy tale reflecting the archetypes inhabiting a young woman’s subconscious as she entered adulthood; Too Old To Die Young does the same with a man’s subconscious, bringing the production closer to Only God Forgives. Here we see an overview of all deeply rooted, primal male conflicts and frustrations: the desire to conquer and surpass one’s father; the Oedipus complex; the need for domination and to cement one’s position in the pack; the hunter’s gene, fascination with violence, latent aggression; the fear of leaving boyhood and entering manhood; introversion; homoerotic longings; fear of women; contempt for women; idealization of womanhood.

For several films now, Refn has taken such archetypal, skeletal stories—bearing the marks of myth and fairy tale, the weight of Greek tragedy or Shakespearean drama—and placed them in contemporary, empty, corrupt realities, mockingly and yet with fascination drawing on modern artistic forms of expression such as music videos and Instagram aesthetics.

Of course, unlike in classic tales, these archetypes and motifs are reshuffled, and the men are humiliated. The best example is Jesus, bestial and bloodthirsty, incestuously desiring his own mother, entangled in an ambiguous relationship with his cousin, and engaged in a perverse game with Yaritza.

A men’s world cannot exist without women, so in Too Old To Die Young they are also key figures. More: the characters of Diana and Yaritza (Cristina Rodlo) belong to an almost mystical order, introducing elements of literal magic into the story. The entire plot can be interpreted as a duel between these two women, who in mysterious ways influence the course of events and manipulate the other characters like pawns on a board.

Yaritza is the undeniable star of this production and has instantly joined my list of favorite heroines in cinema. The enigmatic killer in a skull-and-eyes jacket is a worthy partner to a certain famous hero who also wears a jacket—only his bears a scorpion.

The series is a succession of scenes that can be read both as self-contained units and as parts of a coherent whole, examining the difficult themes of violence and death. Above all, though, Too Old To Die Young is a triumph of everything cinematic. Alejandro Jodorowsky called the Dane a visionary and the only contemporary director he was interested in over a decade ago. Indeed, Refn, more than most, can create images that stick with you long after the screening ends: Viggo suspended in dark void, shooting at symbols of American idiocy and immorality; the eighteen-year-old Martin’s girlfriend, on whom all the guests merrily dance to 999’s Homicide, while the protagonist’s mind overlays visions of bloodied bodies on that sweet tableau; childish, noisy cops so out of place in the grim narrative staging a grotesque Passion play to mark their colleague’s retirement; Jesus, lit red, with a whip, mimicking the devil to music that evokes slaughtering pigs.

Every scene in which the High Priestess of Death wields her weapon adorned with diamonds and a hanging man motif. The now-famous car chase sequence. I could go on for ages; after every episode, as the end credits roll to Martinez’s electronic score, I wanted to leap from the sofa and chant Refn! Refn! Refn! with the same blind fanaticism with which, in one episode, a group of cops screamed Fascism! Fascism! Fascism! in a wonderful parody of coaching and MLM meetings.

The Dane’s latest work will not satisfy the overwhelming majority of viewers.

Film critics will shake their heads in unison like mechanical monkeys. Amazon Prime, which debuted Too Old To Die Young in June, has already distanced itself from the Refn-Brubaker production: their work has practically gone unpromoted. And you know what? I do not give a damn. I will take one such auteur piece over ten assembly-line Netflix dramas any day—talky, forgettable, gone in a week. Refn made a series for himself—and it is great that he flatters no one, remains true to his vision, and makes the cinema he himself wants to watch, instead of guessing what lies in viewers’ minds and bowing to the verdicts of statistics, producers, and analysts. When something is for everyone, it is for no one.

And let art continue to seek not money but new solutions.