DIRECTOR
Alan J. Pakula
SCREENWRITERS
David
Aaron Cohen
Vincent Patrick
Kevin Jarre
STORY
BY
Kevin
Jarre
PRODUCERS
Robert F. Colesberry
Lawrence Gordon
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Gordon Willis
MUSIC
James Horner
EDITORS
Tom Rolf
Dennis Virkler
CAST
Harrison Ford (Tom O'Meara)
Brad Pitt (Frankie McGuire)
Margaret Colin (Sheila O'Meara)
Rubén Blades (Edwin Diaz)
Treat Williams (Billy Burke)
George Hearn (Peter Fitzsimmons)
Mitchell Ryan (Chief Jim Kelly)
Natascha McElhone (Megan Doherty)
Julia Stiles (Bridget O'Meara)
Ashley Carin (Morgan O'Meara)
Kelly Singer (Annie O'Meara)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 111m
U.S. release: March 26, 1997
Video availability: VHS - DVD
|
The
Devil's Own is a lukewarm
and insecure movie about violence and moral dilemmas -- the usual
Hollywoodization of Big Themes. Its brave stance is threefold:
(A) that revenge doesn't solve anything; (B) that the Irish troubles
are really confusing; and (C) that in a battle between two male
stars, the guy with the biggest ... um ... box office will win.
This is why we don't fear for Harrison Ford's life, but we do
expect Brad Pitt to go to the great phony-accent school in the
sky.
Pitt, whose erratic lilt is more Irish Spring than Irish, is
Frank McGuire, an IRA terrorist who leaves Belfast and flees
to New York under the name Rory Devaney. For reasons I didn't
quite buy, Frank finds lodging with Tom O'Meara (Ford), an Irish-American
cop with a beautiful wife (Margaret Colin) and three daughters.
Tom, apparently unspoiled by his 23 years as a New York cop,
welcomes this stranger into his home and is delighted to have
a housemate "who can pee standing up."
Despite Frank's urinary talents, he soon gets in hot water. Which
is a shame, because the domestic stuff in The Devil's Own
is rich and funny. It's a hoot to see Harrison Ford navigating
around three noisy girls, and he has an easy rapport with Margaret
Colin, a seriously underrated character actress thrown away (along
with everyone else) in Independence
Day. And Pitt is touching in the moments when Frank embraces
this family life -- everything he didn't have and can never have.
But then the movie falls back with a sigh of relief into a conventional
gun-running plot, wherein Frank tries to get weapons to send
back home; the deal goes bad, and Frank's enemies invade Tom's
home. That scene, like every other bit of violence in the film,
is crisply staged and genuinely alarming. But then Tom ships
his wife and kids off to her sister's house (why do movie wives
always have a sister to stay with when things get dangerous?),
and Margaret Colin and her entertaining girls vanish, taking
much of my interest with them.
What's left is a lot of moral grappling, not all of which has
one iota of relevance to the plot. For instance, Tom's partner
(Ruben Blades) shoots an unarmed guy in the back, and Tom undergoes
a huge crisis about covering up the mistake. The partner may
or may not have known that the guy had thrown away his gun, and
may or may not have fired in vengeful anger (the guy had shot
at them). This subplot may or may not be there to suggest that
police work can be as ambiguous as Belfast warfare, and I may
or may not think that all it does is slow the movie down. Why
not have Tom be the cop who snaps and shoots the unarmed man?
Then this tortured subplot would mean something.
Ford, our great American man of the movies, gives one of his
better performances here -- nearly trembling with outrage and
despair at how his surrogate son Frank has betrayed him -- and
it's a pity the script, which was notoriously sketchy when shooting
began and presumably didn't improve much, just leads him into
a dumb confrontation with Brad Pitt on a boat. For all its hefty
brooding (Alan J. Pakula, a master brooder, directed), The
Devil's Own is as muddled as the Irish troubles it virtually
ignores, and the characters are stuck in the mud. |
