DIRECTOR
Neil
Jordan
SCREENWRITERS
Neil
Jordan
Patrick McCabe
based
on the novel by
Patrick
McCabe
PRODUCERS
Redmond Morris
Stephen Woolley
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Adrian Biddle
MUSIC
Elliot Goldenthal
EDITOR
Tony Lawson
CAST
Eamon Owens (Francie Brady)
Sean McGinley (Sergeant)
Peter Gowen (Leddy)
Alan Boyle (Joe Purcell)
Andrew Fullerton (Phillip Nugent)
Fiona Shaw (Mrs. Nugent)
Aisling O'Sullivan (Annie Brady)
Stephen Rea (Da Brady/Adult Francie)
John Kavanagh (Dr. Boyd)
Ian Hart (Uncle Alo)
Brendan Gleeson (Father Bubbles)
Milo O'Shea (Father Sullivan)
Sinéad O'Connor (Our Lady/Colleen)
Patrick McCabe (Jimmy The Skite)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 109m
U.S. release: April 3, 1998
Video availability: VHS
Official
website
Other Neil
Jordan films
reviewed on this website:
- Interview
with the Vampire
- Michael
Collins
- In
Dreams
|
The
Butcher Boy begins
boldly, with lurid comic-book panels filling the screen under
the opening credits. This economical grabber has two effects:
it sets the stage for the movie's unstable, violent fantasia,
and it assures you that the director, Neil Jordan, knows exactly
what he's doing. Jordan has found a visual hook comparable to
the first line of Patrick McCabe's book (which the movie also
uses, courtesy of the script by McCabe and Jordan): "When
I was a young lad twenty or thirty or forty years ago I lived
in a small town where they were all after me on account of what
I done on Mrs Nugent."
What exactly the young Irish protagonist Francie Brady (Eamonn
Owens) did on Mrs. Nugent is covered in a casually horrible paragraph
-- an afterthought in a fever dream -- and Jordan, like McCabe,
is less interested in the crime itself than in the demented logic
that leads to it. If you wanted to discount the novel and come
up with a crass Hollywood analogy, you might call the movie A
Clockwork Orange meets Heavenly Creatures. But then
you'd miss what makes The Butcher Boy truly unsettling
-- the way it crosses, unnoticed, the line between garden-variety
childhood tomfoolery and full-blown psychosis.
I invoked Heavenly Creatures for another reason: Eamonn
Owens jumps out at you the way Kate Winslet did in her debut.
Looking like a pint-size Terry Gilliam (he has the same cartoonish,
mile-wide grin), Owens hurries from one mishap to the next, playing
Francie with an animalistic exuberance that immediately puts
us on his side -- everyone else in this grim Irish town seems
depressed and waterlogged. It takes a while before you realize
that Francie is, as Cartman might say, a very disturbed little
boy.
The Butcher Boy presents Francie's worldview as a toxic
brew of pop culture, Cold War paranoia, class resentment, Catholicism,
and deficient genes: his dad (Stephen Rea) is an alcoholic failed
musician, his mom (Aisling O'Sullivan) a manic-depressive who
takes "tablets" and bakes hundreds of sweets for a
small party. The ill-fated Mrs. Nugent (Fiona Shaw, with a Dickensian
stiff upper lip trembling in outrage) denounces Francie and family
as "pigs," an unfortunate analogy that only fuels Francie's
fire.
The film is narrated by an adult Francie (also played by Stephen
Rea), chuckling fondly over his youthful pranks. As Francie's
actions get more violent, the narration remains jovial -- it's
like A Christmas Story retold by a sociopath. (There are
various darkly funny, and surely unintentional, parallels between
the two movies -- imagine Ralphie obsessed with butcher's tools
instead of a Red Ryder BB gun.) We want to follow Francie along,
and though we dread what's coming, a part of us wants
it to happen -- we want the catharsis, the ferocious end result
of all this swirling Catholic/pig/slaughterhouse imagery. When
it comes, it is flat and undramatic and unsatisfying, and is
perhaps Neil Jordan's crowning achievement as a director. The
whole sensually heightened movie leads up to a murder that takes
place mostly offscreen. An ingenious touch (and true to the novel):
For Francie, the build-up and aftermath are much more exciting.
A lot of the publicity has centered on the casting of Sinéad
O'Connor as the Virgin Mary -- a decision, Jordan has insisted,
that wasn't meant to provoke controversy. In context, the casting
makes perfect sense: the Virgin Mary who appears in Francie's
deranged visions and says things like "For fuck's sake"
wouldn't have much use for a Pope anyway. She's fighting for
elbow room with a lot of other things in Francie's head -- his
mind seems fractured into glitzy panels, like a page of a comic
book. And Neil Jordan has assembled those fragments into a forceful
and unforgettable ode to madness -- a horror film in the truest
sense. |
