Plot
Colin Diamond (Ray Winstone) is a successful car salesman who, after discovering his wife Liz is having an affair, has an emotional breakdown. His friends convince him to kidnap his wife's lover and then encourage him to torture and kill him.
Diamond's partners in crime are suave homosexual gambler Meredith (Ian McShane), crotchety and bigoted Old Man Peanut (John Hurt), the down to earth Archie (Tom Wilkinson) and the combustible Mal (Stephen Dillane), who by turns encourage Colin's lust for revenge and sympathise with his situation, and conspire to emotionally and mentally torture Liz's new boyfriend, Loverboy, a "Frog" waiter, first by locking him in a cupboard and threatening him, and tying him up and subjecting him to humiliating verbal and physical assault.
Parts of the story occur in flashback, with Colin discovering Liz's infidelity and the after effects of it, which then affect the present, in which he tries to come to terms with the shame and torment that this brings to him. Parts of the story also appear to happen inside Colin's mind, with him trying to reconcile with himself, using his friends as representations of his own turmoil, and his resolving of the situation.
Read more about this topic: 44 Inch Chest
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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why are they no help to me now
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—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)