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The Butcher
Boy
****
Cinema
Releases - February 20, 1998
Rated on a 4-star
scale; Ireland/USA; Directed by Neil Jordan; Written by Neil Jordan, Patrick
McCabe; based on the novel by McCabe. Starring Eammon Owens, Stephen Rea,
Fiona Shaw, Alan Boyle, Aisling O'Sullivan, Sinead
O'Connor.
Neil Jordan's "The Butcher Boy" continues
a delightful recent trend of films whose meandering structures make them
feel like dreams. In the past few months we've had "Titanic", "The Ice Storm",
"U-Turn", and now Jordan's film.
Based on the hugely successful novel by Patrick
McCabe, which I confess I did not read, the film charters the journey of
young Francie Brady(Eammon Owens) from being a boy in 1950s small-town Ireland
mucking about with his friend Joe (Alan Boyle), to a mental patient whose
acts are notorious in that same town. In that journey, the film manages to
deal with a variety of disturbing subjects, making no attempt to hide what
it is leading up to, a brutal killing by the open-faced lad. It is not made
any less shocking by the massive build-up.
Those subjects start off with Francie's broken
home. His mother is a very stressed woman whose excitement at the prospect
of a visitor is so great that it develops into a subplot, and whose stress
is so great at other times that we can physically feel her strain. A lot
of that strain is caused by Francie's father (Stephen Rea), a drunk who very
rarely wakes up, but who does a lot of bad things when he does, even though
he is not, we later see, a bad person. Francie's mother is sent to a psychiatric
hosptial, which he refers to in a running joke as "the garage", because she's
going away to get fixed, like a car.
Francie himself is sent away, being dragged by
local police to a strict boarding school in which a deranged priest, Father
Sullivan (Milo O'Shea), sexually abuses him. When Sullivan is caught and
Francie is returned home by the school to avoid word getting out, he becomes
uncomfortably used to his father's drunkenness. He also, tragically, grows
apart from Joe, and develops poisonous hatred for Mrs. Nugent (Fiona Shaw),
the snooty mother of a local nerd. Unable to cope, Francie's flamboyant antics
deteriorate into boisterousness, detachment from reality, and, eventually,
violence.
Yet this potentially disturbing film is handled
as a crazy, unstoppable black comedy. It is as strange, involving and twisted
as an epic dream, and , as I said, made like one. The cinematography by Adrian
Biddle ("Aliens", "Willow", "1492") is beautiful enough to hold our attention
while dark and hypnotic enough to engulf our consciousness. The sound, too,
is designed to be loud enough not to be ignored and clear enough to be heard.
The editing and direction pace the film at the speed of light, and it feels
like a slick version of an experimental movie -- Jordan is throwing enough
paint at the screen to drown Godzilla.
Strange, how well this workd. Even in the current
sensitive climate, with the Jonesboro killings out of the news for only a
few weeks, it is still possible to accept "The Butcher Boy" as twisted fun,
and I did. This is a film which grabbed me as soon as the opening credits
were finished, and left me gasping.
That could also be said for the unbelievable
performance by Eammon Owens, which deserves a thousand awards. He makes Francie
a character it is impossible not to like or feel for, even when he says or
does the most outrageous and even cruel things. On television, in little
clips, he seems more annoying than impressive, but seen in the context of
the whole film his work is loud and energetic in a way that carries the
picture.
On top of this mad concoction of demented imagery,
and the best child performance since Anna Paquin's in "The Piano", we get
Sinead O'Connor as the Virgin Mary, mad lines like "When I was a child twenty
or thirty or forty years ago...", Francie conversing with his own voice-over,
and emotional involvement despite the subject and style. This is one unique
way to spend a few hours, and one of Neil Jordan's best films, in a career
including "The Crying Game", "Interview With The Vampire", "Mona Lisa" and
"Michael Collins".
COPYRIGHT© 1998 Ian
Waldron-Mantgani
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