Film Review - Knuckle (2011)

There is a trend in documentary filmmaking for the filmmaker to put his or herself in the film. No more the outside observer, filmmakers such as Nick Broomfield and Michael Moore have made this practice feel very familiar in the last decade. The director of Knuckle, Iain Palmer, whilst not visually present in the film, does become a major character in the film: interacting quite a lot with the subjects of the documentary. This is to some degree expected as he has made this film over 9 years and the subjects of the film would certainly have come to know him quite a bit. The flipside of this, however, is that Palmer risks his objectivity and one of the uncomfortable feelings watching his film is that he has become one of the gang. In fairness to the director he does point out the risk of this himself in voiceover during the film.

Knuckle tells the story of bitter feuds between various traveller families which seem to have been going on for decades. The central feud is the one between the Joyce Mc Donaghs and the Quinns. The modern incarnation of the feud seems to be a murder of the one of the members in London in the early 1990s. There seems to be no end to the fights and hatred that emanates from these two families. The men are the decision makers and fighters who are in charge of everything. The women seem to be submissive and, in this documentary, are rarely on camera.

This is a serious documentary with some appalling violence throughout as fights are organised. There is humour here however as the precursor to fights usually revolves around one member of the family sending a video challenging a rival for a fight and profanely insulting him. Anyone who has ever watched American wrestling will be struck by how eerily similar the videos are to the pontificating of the wrestlers being interviewed. But the fights themselves are brutal and bloody. You can feel every punch landed. There is admirably no sanitising it for the audience. Palmer is a filmmaker who clearly has the respect and trust of these men. There is unprecedented access to a community that is generally closed off. There is an argument to be had that he is only showing one particular part of the traveller way of life and it is probably a fair criticism. But in fairness to Palmer the title of his film points out exactly what he was looking to document.

There is one scene where Palmer finally gets a chance to talk to the women of one of the families. This scene is quite revealing as it shows an unexpectedly progressive attitude towards the cycle of violence that engulfs them. One is left wanting more of that kind of input. There is also the feeling that despite the rivalry and feuding that exists that there is another reason altogether for the fights and this is money. Up to €20,000 has been bet on some of these fights and one can’t help wonder if that figure is only what people are prepared to admit to. If this is a strong reason for the fights it adds a cynical edge to an already unpleasant business.

Knuckle is a tough watch. It is about an unpleasant subject yet it is hard to take your eyes from it. Palmer has crafted a fascinating and brutal documentary that enthrals and appals in equal measure. The people in the film are colourful and entertaining and come out with some hilarious phrases. Yet it is hard not to feel saddened by the limited viewpoint of the world that the men have in these two families and the lack of influence the women have. It is this in the end that is the great tragedy and not the fighting itself.

Film Review - One Hundred Mornings (2011)

‘I knew it was coming, I didn’t expect it to happen so quickly’.

This phrase is uttered in a quiet style by Tim (Robert O Mahoney) whilst drinking vodka early on in Conor Horgan’s quietly superb One Hundred Mornings. When the end of the civilised world arrives one imagines it would happen the way it is shown here. It seems to have ceased to exist not with a loud crack but a sickening whimper. What is left are pockets of people clinging together hoping that something, indeed anything will happen to bring back familiarity. Instead we have empty towns and an Ireland where the Gardai are carrying shotguns.

Two couples, Jonathan (Ciaran Mc Menamin) and Hannah (Alex Reid) and Mark (Rory Keenan) and Katie (Kelly Campbell) are holed up in a cabin in Wicklow. There has been an unspecified event that seems to have brought general western standard of living to a standstill. Food is being rationed and the electricity has been out for quite a while. There is an older neighbour (Tim) who is friendly but distant with the group. The two couples are living on top of each other and nerves are frayed. Supplies are dwindling and they lack any real weapons to defend themselves. Clearly something unprecedented has taken place and as outsiders begin to learn that this group still has supplies, the threats start to multiply.

It is not difficult to read this as a mirroring of our times. The theme is not particularly subtle but its execution is done very subtly and without fanfare. To Horgan’s credit he gets the information out, not with chunks of exposition, but with visual clues throughout. There is no real talk of what happened but instead we get visuals: the accumulated detritus under an abandoned car’s windscreen wipers. Even Jonathan’s smoking one cigarette a day to make them last gives a sense of the time that has passed and the time left ahead of them. There is a subplot here involving infidelity within the group but unusually it does not become a dominant issue. There is a cold logic to this. If you are facing starvation that would probably take precedence over everything else.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the film is in the tiny incidental pleasures in glimpsing things that were always taken for granted. There is a scene of great joy when normalization returns briefly. To say more would be to spoil it but it shows how much we take for granted and how much we miss things when they are gone. The tiniest pleasures for the most fleeting of moments work well here and are believable and organic within the story. The cinematography by Suzie Lavelle is quite beautiful making full use of the wonderful Wicklow locations. The score by Chris White is sparse and is used brilliantly to accentuate the loneliness and hopelessness of the situation. The acting is pretty good from the four leads - if a little uneven. Mc Menamin stands out in the ensemble as one to watch. O’Mahoney as the neighbour who does great work in the amount of screen time he has.

There is a brilliant shot of Hannah scrubbing clothes in a stream that calls to mind those famine drawings of women doing the same thing. And it is to those times that the film reaches back to. A time where people left and took their chance someplace else or stayed and died. It is this nihilistic viewpoint which is the film’s key strength. It works within the film and also as an analysis of the times we now find ourselves in. One Hundred Mornings is probably the first film to address the mess Ireland currently finds itself in and like the politicians we depend on, it offers us no way out of it. As a film dealing with end times this is not one of the zombie persuasions which give you easily definable heroes and villains. It says straight out that the enemies are ourselves and that we better make some difficult choices before it is too late. All this may does not give you the feel good DVD release of the summer, but it deserves to be seen by a large audience who can appreciate a low budget and superbly realised film.

Out on DVD Monday 23^rd July.

Film Review - Perrier's Bounty (2009)

The Gangster film as a genre is one of formula.  Like any other genre, there are standards and tropes we come to expect to be in most, if the not all, of the films. There is the innocent guy generally with a girl to protect. He has a set amount of time to get either a product or money to a crime boss. The crime boss is generally not introduced until about a third of the way through the film but his legend is established in other characters conversations. And there are usually a couple of henchmen who do the dirty work for the main boss.

The origins of the gangster film is American with the 1912 film The Musketeers of Pig Alley by DW Griffith one of the earliest examples. The American gangster film sits proudly alongside the Western as one of America’s finest contributions to film history. What is very interesting is when the genre is subverted or filtered through another country’s culture. The most obvious examples in the US are Quentin Tarantino’s 1990s films Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction and Guy Richie’s Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels in the UK.

The main problem with the films listed above is not with the films themselves but rather the influence of them on films that came after. In the US in the 1990s there were a lot of films described as Tarantinoesque which were nothing but a pale imitation of his filmic style. In the UK it has been arguably worse. While Lock Stock is no masterpiece, it stands as a towering achievement when stood beside some of the quite appalling films that came after. But what flows through the US to the UK will inevitably flow into Ireland as well. And it is this flow which brings us to Perrier’s Bounty.

Perrier’s Bounty is directed by talented Irish filmmaker Ian Fitzgibbon (Death of a Superhero) and written by Mark O Rowe (Intermission, Boy A). It possesses a heavyweight cast including Cillian Murphy, Brendan Gleeson, Liam Cunningham and Jim Broadbent. There is a serious pedigree here. The plot is a fairly basic one. Michael McCrea (Murphy) has a day to return money owed to gang boss Darren Perrier (Gleeson). Add to this mix, his father (Broadbent) - who turns up to make peace with him - and Perrier’s two henchmen (nicely played by Don Wycherly and Michael Mc Elhatton) who are a constant threat. The film is set up within the classic gangster structure.

First thing to say and it pains me to say it a little as I had heard good things, this film is a mess from start to finish. It falls into the familiar trap of the post Tarantino generation of having every character sound exactly the same. All the characters talk in a quite frankly bizarre way, spurting forth with cod philosophy at every turn for no real reason. It starts to grate 20 minutes in and by the end of the film you are almost pleading with them through the screen to stop talking. This is a serious flaw and a real pity as there are some good lines of dialogue throughout. It is just that they should only have come from one character. Instead they all just came from the screenwriter.

The acting throughout the film is uneven with Murphy playing it like his heart isn’t in it. Cunningham does the best overall with not much to go on. He has become one of our great character actors and should have really been a bigger star than he is. His delivery of a great line is one the films few highlights. Looking a woman up and down in a bar he describes her as ‘dirty, like a bag of carrots’. Gleeson is ok, but he has done this thing before in better films than this. My heart weeps for Broadbent who is comically miscast. His bizarre accent, swaying between English and Irish is absurd. One wonders what possessed him to take the part. There is also a slightly cringe worthy narration from Gabriel Byrne, the purpose of which is to seemingly mock film narration. It doesn’t work. All it does is call to mind narrations that work such as Sam Elliott’s in The Big Lebowski.

Overall, Perrier’s Bounty is not worth the effort to see it. Rowe’s previous screenplay Intermission makes better use of his writing talents. This is a muddled film, caught between aping the 1990s English gangster film and trying to add something through an Irish filter. It succeeds at neither. All involved have gone on to bigger and better things and for that, one imagines, they can breathe a sigh of relief after making this film. 

New Irish Film Trailer Barbaric Genius

This Paul Duane directed documentary looks at the extraordinary life of John Healy, a London Irish author. The trailer tells the background to the story more effectively than I could. It is showing now at the IFI in Dublin and should be worth a look. I am heading out of the country tomorrow for a few weeks so won't be able to see it to write a review.

Please let me know what you think of it. The trailer is below.

Film Review - Charlie Casanova (2012)

When discussing Irish films it can be informative to look at the era in which the films are released and the state of the nation at that particular time. During the Celtic Tiger era for example there was a run of frothy films (When Brendan Met Trudy, About Adam, Goldfish Memory) that showed a Dublin alive with charming rich people, sipping espressos without a care in the world. These films seemed to say that we have finally made it - we have a highly desirable capital city to live in. We had fancy coffee, Michelin star restaurants, even sunshine. It was all there on the screen so it had to be true.

In reality it was not. I grew up in Coolock in the 1980s and 1990s and I can say with some certainty that the Celtic Tiger passed us by. There should have been more anger then from the disenfranchised but there was not. The working class stood idly by and watched successive governments have ‘giveaway’ budgets, cynical cash-ins to ensure another term. We got to press our faces against real estate windows and look at houses we could never afford to buy. It was Dublin in the rare old times only for the ruling class and we had the films to match. These were films for ‘them’.

So years later, in the midst of the worst economic conditions for at least a generation, where are the films to reflect our anger at the downturn? We have had very little in this regard. One Hundred Mornings (probably correctly) seemed to be saying that the collapse of society will happen in a very quiet way without the usual associated film hysterics. But Charlie Casanova is coming at us from the aggressive end of the spectrum. This is an angry film with an angry central character from a very angry writer and director. There is something admirable in an uncompromising film as a concept. But all the anger in the world is worthless if you don’t have a film to sell and the question is thus: does Charlie Casanova stand up on its own terms?

The answer to this is a resounding yes, but it is a film not without problems. Charlie Casanova tells the story of Charlie Barnham who after hitting a woman in a working class neighbourhood with his car, lets a deck of cards decide her fate. Emboldened by the way he has seemingly got away with it, Charlie bullies his wife and friends into letting the cards make decisions for them, with some strange and tragic circumstances. Charlie takes these kinds of risks with increasing dangers for all involved as his life starts to spiral out of control. In plot terms, that is about it. The story is punctuated with some extraordinary set pieces including two darkly funny scenes involving an improv comedy set and an interview in a Garda station. In between the gallows humour are lengthy diatribes about men not being men and the ruling classes taking back the streets from the despised working class.

The film works best in the first hour. The use of a fractured narrative serves it well here. There is some wonderful cinematography by Eoin Macken, capturing everything in wonderfully grubby and intense close ups. There is simply nowhere else to look as the intimate events unfold. There is a brutally sad but quietly tender scene in a bath that is captured beautifully by Macken. The hotel that they stay in is has a soulless empty feeling, echoing empty businesses around the country. The building of tension in the first hour is expertly done and it does implode after the comedy improv. It is here that the film goes off the rails. Pacing becomes an issue here as the film slows down and the seams start to show. Thankfully the film rebounds with a chilling last 10 minutes. There is a wonderful final shot that is held for quite a long time that destroys any notion of a traditional sense of closure.

Emmet Scanlon is terrific in the title role. He is in virtually every scene and carries the film all the way. There has been criticism of his rantings as some sort of cod philosophy but surely that is the point. Charlie is an educated fool, a half baked car salesman whose opinions should be dismissed as such. Scanlon gets into his character to show the heartless monster beneath the confident exterior. The supporting cast are good and do quite a bit with somewhat underwritten roles.

Charlie Casanova is not a film for everyone. It is a tough watch - in your face from the first moment. There is plenty of room for a confrontational film in our film history and is a refreshing departure from the standard. With the reported miniscule budget it should also be inspirational to the next generation of filmmakers, letting them know that personal films, can be made, advertised and released regardless of budget. This has not really happened before with much success. Even if you don’t like the film this is surely a good thing for our industry. This is a film whose message on class and politics will become more important in the years to come as Ireland continues to devour itself and the working classes bear the brunt stoically as ever. That is a pretty good legacy for an Irish film to have.

Film Review - The Dead (1987)

The inevitability of death permeates through John Huston’s remarkable final film. The adaptation of the short story of the same name by James Joyce, The Dead tells the story of an Epiphany party held in Dublin in 1904 and its aftermath. Whether it is the director himself, sick and frail whilst making the film (it would be released posthumously) or the beautiful monologue at the end of the film revealing that ‘one by one we’re all becoming shades’. Death hangs over this film like a shroud. There is talk of the loss of a life in the film too, an expected and profoundly moving loss but the knowledge of this arrives unexpectedly. This reveal is wonderfully done in the hands of a filmmaker who expertly knew how to handle such material.

And yet the film begins in almost jovial fashion with the arrival of several carriages of people to the party on a snowy Dublin night. The two elderly sisters are at the top of the stairs in a bit of a frenzy, nervously wondering if a particular guest Freddie Malins (the wonderful Donal Donnelly) will arrived ‘stewed’. The arrival of nephew Gabriel (Donal Mc Cann) and his wife Gretta (Angelica Huston) calms their nerves somewhat as it is expected that he will keep an eye on Freddie. Freddie duly arrives a little drunk and the stage is seemingly set for a comic dinner. But this being Joyce and not Wilde, this is not the case.

It becomes so much more. Seemingly innocuous conversations have underlying meanings. As the men and women dance before dinner, the camera seems to float beautifully between them. Snatches of conversations are heard from the various dance partners and it is clear that there is some unease beneath the surface. That there is tension between Gabriel and Gretta and this may have something to do with another woman at the party, Mrs. Ivors (Maria Mc Dermottroe) who Gabriel dances with. She rebukes him for holidaying in France instead of the west of Ireland. She is a political woman, calling Gabriel a ‘West Briton’ for looking to England instead of his own country. There is again a feeling of death just out of reach here: The Great War is only 10 years away, the Easter Rising 2 years after that.

One of the elderly sisters Miss Julia (Cathleen Delaney) sings a song ‘Arrayed for the Bridal’ and it is here that age and death take centre stage. As she sings slightly out of tune with a very weak voice Huston’s camera cuts away to show empty rooms and things like ornaments of angels to underscore her old age. As she finishes, there is an artificial rush to congratulate her for her singing. Freddie, by now drunk, says that he has never heard her sing better. Embarrassingly he keeps repeating this and the others start to look away. It is another song that leads to the most magnificent of endings however. One of the guests, Mr. Darcy (the Irish tenor Frank Patterson) sings a beautifully sad song called ‘The Lass of Aughrim’. This brings to the surface long buried feelings of loss and guilt.

The cast are uniformly excellent, with special mention going to Donal Mc Cann and Donal Donnelly. Angelica Huston is also wonderful, all glances and pain hidden just out of sight. Cinematography is wonderful with the camera intimately moving from room to room. The set is beautifully lit with candles everywhere which further underlines the shadows cast by the story. It is a wonderful film, richly textured, remarkably quiet but asking the big questions in this way. This is about life, what we do with it while we are here, and how it affects others when we are gone. But these themes are woven into the fabric of the film by a director of some skill. The Dead is now 25 years old yet if feels like it could have been made today. Yet with a literary heritage that is the envy of the world, the question has to be asked as to why Irish filmmakers are not making films from such rich source material. It is a question for another article perhaps, the joy here is that The Dead was made at all and for that we should all be thankful.