Opinion | Guy Ritchies The Gentlemen dresses up anti-Semitism |

This column includes spoilers for the plot of “The Gentlemen” and also, possibly, your ability to enjoy the movie.

If you were choosing a canary in a coal mine to warn you about ascendant anti-Semitism in America, the entertainment industry might not be high on your list of candidates. Hollywood loves turning anti-Semites into villains, whether Charlie Chaplin and Taika Waititi are turning Adolf Hitler into cartoons, Quentin Tarantino is barbecuing Nazis in a movie theater or Steven Spielberg and Guillermo del Toro are delivering supernatural smackdowns to evildoers determined to establish a Fourth Reich. Movies and television provide a comforting fantasy where the Holocaust and other anti-Jewish acts are continually avenged; the rising toll of anti-Semitic hate crimes and harassment is the reality.

But it’s this status as a kind of safe harbor that makes Guy Ritchie’s stylish new crime caper, “The Gentlemen,” such a disturbing indicator. If a mainstream movie can say the sorts of things that “The Gentlemen” says about Jewish people, then the poisonous miasmas of anti-Semitism have spread far beyond the synagogues, Hanukkah parties and Jewish neighborhoods that have been the real early warning signs.

“The Gentlemen” stars Matthew McConaughey as Mickey Pearson, a suave, London-based marijuana grower and distributor, as he tries to sell his operation to Matthew (“Succession” star Jeremy Strong). Understandably, especially since this is a Guy Ritchie movie, offloading a massive drug empire is not without its complications, among them: rival Chinese buyers, including Dry Eye (“Crazy Rich Asians’” Henry Golding) and Lord George (Tom Wu); a group of street-fighting teenagers led by Coach (Colin Farrell); a family of Russian oligarchs and a heroin-addicted aristocratic teenager; a grumpy newspaper editor (Eddie Marsan); and a rascally private eye named Fletcher (a delightful Hugh Grant), who tries to blackmail Mickey through his consigliere Ray (Charlie Hunnam, surprisingly great).

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But underneath all of the great men’s tailoring and precisely calibrated banter, something ugly is happening.

Matthew is Jewish, which for the purposes of “The Gentlemen” appears to mean that he is good with money, is devious to the point of unscrupulousness about his business affairs and hires giant bodyguards he describes as his “Mossad crabs.” “Trust this Jew about that Jew,” Mickey’s wife, Rosalind (Michelle Dockery), warns him when the two men commence talks, a scene that, given what comes after, seems to exist mostly to inoculate “The Gentlemen” against charges of anti-Semitism by suggesting that there are Jews on both sides of the conflict.

Matthew is not merely a tough negotiator; in the grand tradition of anti-Semitic tropes, he’s cheap and a cheat, working with Dry Eye to drive down the value of Mickey’s business, with some of Coach’s trainees as his cat’s paws. The result is a plot in which Jewish and Chinese people are ganging up on white men who are working class in their origins, using — among other people — young black men as their instruments. “The Gentlemen” ends with Mickey’s Chinese and Jewish antagonists dead or maimed, and a consolidated alliance between the black and white characters who began, or remain, lower down on the class scale.

Maybe this isn’t intentional. Ritchie and his collaborators clearly have some thoughts about the decline of the English aristocracy relative to new money from the former Soviet Union. But like the directorial equivalent of the “distracted boyfriend” meme, Ritchie has a tendency to get diverted from deeper meaning by snazzy suiting and surface cleverness, as in a scene in “The Gentlemen” where two characters debate whether an insult actually counts as a slur. Still, even if Ritchie wasn’t deliberately slapping crisp blazers and natty sweaters on a nasty fantasy about model minorities trying to do white men wrong, it’s amazing that “The Gentlemen” made it through every stage of development without anyone’s eyebrows shooting straight up off their heads in response.

That’s never truer than in the movie’s final scene. In Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice,” the Jewish moneylender Shylock’s requirement of a pound of flesh as payment for a debt is presented as macabre and unreasonable. Shylock may have suffered from his debtor’s anti-Semitism and anti-competitive business practices.

“The Gentlemen” inverts Shylock’s demand when, as retribution for Dry Eye’s attempted rape of Rosalind, Mickey insists that Matthew not only make him whole for his business losses financially but that Matthew excise a pound of his own flesh. Unlike Shylock’s pursuit of his payment, “The Gentlemen” treats Mickey’s brutality as reasonable, even chivalrous. This isn’t just a double standard: “The Gentlemen” takes an act that marks a Jewish character as monstrous in Shakespeare and flips it around, suggesting that another Jewish character deserves to be forced to mutilate himself. “The Gentlemen” uses Rosalind both as an excuse and a mask: Mickey is acting both in defense of, and on the advice of, his Jewish wife, who counsels him to be ruthless. But sorting people by whether they’re Good Jews or Bad Jews isn’t a refutation to charges of anti-Semitism, especially when what determines the characters’ goodness or badness is whether they’re on the side of the heroic Gentiles.

The greatest power Hollywood has is the ability to transform an image, giving grandeur to overlooked things and turning the formidable into the foolish. More than most people, even most of his fellow directors, Guy Ritchie’s talent is for making things look cool. It’s too bad the thing that he’s dressed up this time is anti-Semitism.

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Opinion | Guy Ritchies The Gentlemen dresses up anti-Semitism

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