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2-Way
Mirror
Paula
Shields reflects on the themes
that have shaped the career of Neil Jordan, one f Ireland's
foremost filmmakers, as seen through his latest work, The
Good Thief. [Extract]
An indifferent wind blows across a barren
wasteland, over a deserted, down-at-heel nightclub in the
middle of nowhere, the only sign of life a couple of large
advertising hoardings nearby. Adverts aside, it could be a
scene from a Western, a modern-day, ghost-town saloon bar
in unyielding landscape. The camera closes in on a van and
a lone musician (Stephen Rea) playing sax while a girl (Veronica
Quilligan) listens in the background, creeping closer. With
the mute iconic presence and open, innocent face of the idealised
angel, Annie's murder a few hours later will turn musician
Danny into an Angel of Death, swapping his sax for a gun,
in order to hunt down one by one the paramilitary gang responsible.
Cut to 2002 and another opening scene, another nightclub,
another vulnerable, gamine, angelic-looking girl, another
outlaw male, though this one is rescuing, not avenging her.
1980s Northern Ireland has been replaced by 21st Century Nice,
photographed here (by Chris Menges, who also shot Angel) in
all its sophisticated, seedy allure, a subterranean swirl
of gambling, drugs and trafficked girls. Hulking junkie gambler
Bob Montagnet (Nick Nolte) saves Anne (Nutsa Kukhianidze),
a young Eastern European, from the clutches of her pimp. While
his natural habitat is certainly the wrong side of the law,
Bob has never killed anyone. His quest becomes beauty ('what
money can't buy') in the form of art (and Anne?) as well as
good old filthy lucre (he is a gambler after all!)
From Angel to The Good Thief, from 1982 to date,
Neil Jordan is one of the few Irish directors to have successfully
moved among the Irish, British, European and American filmmaking
industries. The cast list he's worked with over the last twenty
years tells its own tale - Stephen Rea (repeatedly), Liam
Neeson, Bob Hoskins, Charles Dance, Ian Hart, Robert De Niro,
Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, Nick Nolte, Sean Penn.
It is easy to forget that the Ireland of a quarter of a century
ago offered nothing like the scale of creative activity, be
it in literature, theatre or film, which we expect and take
for granted in 2003, even with the recent severity of Arts
Council grant cuts. In a much less favourable artistic climate,
Jordan began as a writer, producing a book of short stories
Night In Tunisia in 1976 and a novel, The Past,
in 1980, which soon won him critical notice and acclaim. His
work has since spanned an impressive visual and narrative
arc of themes and genres, delving into the extremes of the
psyche and the murky half-light of the soul. His films tend
to be the stuff of waking nightmares, populated with tortured,
haunted creatures, be they human beings, ghosts, vampires,
werewolves, delivered in non-naturalistic style.
Angels may be more male than female, as Bob Hoskins' George
tells his best friend Thomas (Robbie Coltrane) in Mona
Lisa but men are frequently referred to angels or beasts
and brutes in Jordan's work. George, the ex-con trying to
save two brutalised prostitutes, is the first in a long line
of good 'bad' men, outlawed from the norms of so-called civilised
society but with a code of honour all their own, often on
some kind of quest. Ned and Jim (more likeable ex-cons, We're
No Angels), Fergus, reluctant IRA man (The Crying Game),
Louis, reluctant vampire (Interview with the Vampire),
Michael Collins, reluctant IRA man, the Brits gave him no
choice/once there is a treaty on the table he wants to stop
the war (Michael Collins), and Bob, junkie gambler
gentleman thief depicted as nice guy (The Good Thief).
Even Butcher Boy child killer Francie has had inadequate,
abusive parents to point to by way of expiation, while Bendrix,
the jealous hate-filled lover/writer and narrator of The
End of the Affair, becomes more sympathetic as he loses
Sarah to God and illness (and more sympathetic than he is
in Graham Greene's original novel). Angel's Danny is
an interesting reversal of this trend. His initial instinct
for revenge is understandable but by the time he has finished
dispensing rough justice on behalf of innocent victim Annie,
it is uncomfortably difficult to tell him apart from the paramilitary
killers.
The
full text of this article is printed in Film Ireland
91
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