Saltwater

Originally printed in Issue 77 - August/September 2000

Gerry McCarthy takes a look at Conor McPherson's first feature as a director.

There are an awful lot of good things in Saltwater, perhaps too many for some tastes. And the good things - resonant glances, good chunks of dialogue, superb casting detail and a range of finely nuanced minor characters -can be said to be, in the broad sense, theatrical. The strongest points in the film derive from disciplines shared with, or related to, the stage. Despite some generic head-nodding, and a few pieces of blatant ironic homage/rip-off, Saltwater does not have a strongly cinematic feel. Such theatricality - and the screenplay is based on McPherson's play, This Lime Tree Bower - is not necessarily a bad thing. There are taboos and shibboleths running through the film world, largely American in origin, and recoiling violently from any hint of a family relationship with theatre. In fact, at their best, the disciplines are convergent: but you must look away from Hollywood towards Europe, to the company set-ups employed by Fassbinder, Fellini, Bergman, or more recently by prolific filmmakers such as Kaurismaki, Almodovar and Paskaljevic. This is not necessarily about adapting plays for the screen - it has more to do with the relationships and sense of interplay that develop within a troupe. There are some things that no amount of rehearsal time will buy.

In Ireland, we have seen straightforward adaptations of modern classics like The Field and Dancing at Lughnasa, both the subject of contentious debate. For me, at least, Jim Sheridan succeeded with The Field by stripping away the themes from JB Keane's original, and reworking the film as a Lear-style tragedy centred on Richard Harris's magnificent Bull. Despite the irony of archetypes like Lear and Oedipus being profoundly theatrical, they have a raw timeless force that can be harnessed to powerful cinematic effect. This power was precisely what Pat O'Connor's Lughnasa lacked - the energy source in Friel's play derives from the on-stage presence of the sisters, live and kicking. In failing to harness an equivalent cinematic dynamo, O'Connor's film was beautiful but flaccid.

A more pertinent case arises when a playwright turns to working in cinema. Billy Roche, after several successful plays, wrote Trojan Eddie, subsequently directed by Gillies MacKinnon. A much under-rated film which also features a powerful performance from Richard Harris, Trojan Eddie was seen in some quarters as being too theatrical. Not in any narrow sense of being enclosed or limited in scope, but because it seemed to lack a strong central narrative. Roche, it was said, lavished too much attention to minor characters: the narrative is complex and diffuse, wandering through parallel strands and failing to engage the viewer.

Structurally, Saltwater is similar, and in neither case is the supposed failing anything as harmful as it's cracked up to be. Detailed characterization in depth can be a real cinematic pleasure - look to American ensemble pieces like Nashville or any number of European films. Failure to comply with the Hollywood model - a couple of good-looking stars surrounded by cardboard cut-outs and overweight hams - is no failure at all.

McPherson showed, with his screenplay for I Went Down, that he could write a tight, contemporary piece of genre cinema, combining narrative drive with an easy disregard for stereotypes. Simply by writing an Irish-based crime story that wasn't based on newspaper clippings, had no true-life analogues, and featured no stereotypical IRA men and drug barons, McPherson and director Paddy Breathnach created a minor classic. Freed from the encumbrances of a specious cinematic Irishness, the film was able to work, very successfully, on its own terms.

Saltwater is more ambitious. McPherson is more concerned with character, less with the dynamics of a classic genre piece. Yet there are many similarities, and some of them are distinctly unsettling. Put in context beside his theatre work, McPherson's writing contains a deliberate anti-intellectualism, a positive hostility to high culture, and a laddish streak a mile wide. The message seems to be that the simple proletarian pleasures of drink, sex and vomit are authentic and life-enhancing, while all that middle-class university-educated pseudo-intellectual guff is just so much hot air. When you strip away their vanities and their snobbery, men are always after the same thing.

In both films a character played by Peter McDonald plans a minor crime which accidentally escalates into a bigger one. Both heists involve characters - albeit very different ones - played by Brendan Gleeson. McDonald - both as Git in I Went Downand as Frank in Saltwater - finds himself in possession of a large wad of untraceable cash. Each character responds in much the same way; he keeps outwardly calm, while organizing a reward for himself. The sense of male hedonism, of amorality, of pleasure and reward, is almost identical. Git and Frank both head straight for a scenario involving plenty of drink, upmarket hotels, sharp but dated clothing, a dancefloor, blonde women and a Jacuzzi. The sense that this is the real thing - the authentic pleasures of a proletarian everyman -is very powerful. And it is contrasted, in Saltwater, with scenes of pseudo-intellectual debate set in a university. McPherson, who taught philosophy in UCD in a previous incarnation, seems to have a chip on his shoulder about his former milieu.

Saltwater has a number of plot strands, mostly centred on the Beneventi family who run a chipper in a North Dublin seaside resort. Widower George, played by Brian Cox, is the hapless father of twentysomething Frank (Peter McDonald) and Joe (Laurence Kinlan). Frank works, apparently without ambition, in the family chipper, but harbours a fierce resentment and a sense of family pride and humiliation. This largely focuses on the figure of 'Simple' Simon McCurdie (Gleeson), local bookie, loan-shark and all-round gombeen man, to whom the Da is in hock. Meanwhile Joe has his own coming-of-age problems, which reach a climax with a drink-sodden disco scene, a paralytic teenage girl, and subseguent rape allegations. Joe's new best friend, Damien, is a stereotyped disturbed teen from a middle-class broken home - his family even have a boat named 'Overdraft'. Damien leads Joe towards trouble, and an already fast-maturing boy has to grow up fast.

These family scenes are well done. There is a sense, in the characterization of George, Frank, and Joe, of males of different ages tackling different but related problems. The fact that the problems keep returning to the old perennials - drink, sex and money - is not, at this point, a major problem.

It is with the introduction of the other main character, Ray, that McPherson can be seen to be trying just a little too hard. Dr Ray Sullivan (Conor Mullen) is a philosophy tutor in the university. He is part of the extended Beneventi clan through his engagement to George's daughter Carmel - of whom we see very little. Ray is having a passionate fling with a student, Deborah (Eva Birthistle, once again cast as Irish cinema's sex object). Although we see little evidence of actual acuity, Ray is apparently feared by his college colleagues for his rapier-like deconstruction of authority. As depicted in scenes with lecturers played by Garret Keogh and Olwen Fouere, this tends to the vaguely obscene personal insult rather than genuine intellectual cut and thrust. Nonetheless, when the college plays host to a distinguished philosopher, Konigsberg - think Heidegger meets Derrida meets Baudrillard, with a near-invisible nod to Immanuel Kant - Ray is lined up to provide a penetrating question. The scene is one of those big Belfield lecture theatres named after the middle letters of the alphabet. The auditorium is packed. Konigsberg stops. Ray stands up - and unleashes, not a question, but a tidal spew of vomit that covers everyone around him. Allowed to continue, he insinuates that the spew is, in fact, his most relevant retort. You vomit, as they say, and I'll sing it.

There is a nagging question of realism here - would today's students, even philosophers, really sit still, grimacing, covered in vomit, and wait for the speaker/vomiter to continue? Or would they run for the bathroom, call their doctors and their lawyers, hysterically calculating the odds of infection and the price of their ruined designer clothing? But, more importantly, the subtext of Ray's upchuck chimes with several other themes in Saltwater. Ray is depicted as torn between the simple family life chez Beneventi, and the sex, arrogance and pseudo-intellectuality of his university persona. The vomit is climactic: Ray's gut makes the decision for him, retching out the phoney and the trite. A real, hungover man, he can return to the world he feels at home in and pursue the simple things in life - more sex, more vomit, more endless drunkenness. And no talking. Frank's most salient character feature, token of his masculinity, is his silence. Real men don't spout words, they spout colloidal liquids with lumps in them.

The paean to drunken hedonism echoes one of McPherson's early plays, Rum and Vodka, essentially the tale of a long alcoholic bender across the class divide. Rum and Vodka is profoundly callow: it is the kind of work one hopes that a writer gets out of his system fast, as it were. As such, it is a pity to see the same themes permeate Saltwater, because there is so much to admire in the film.

The acting is superb; and it is allowed to be superb because casting, writing and direction are utterly coherent. Brian Cox is one of very few visiting stars to take the trouble of getting his accent right: he sounds not just North Dublin, but seaside North Dublin of Italian descent. This is impressive.

As is Gina Moxley, playing the local Garda Sergeant. After far too many films where Irish cops are depicted as morons (Ordinary Decent Criminal), relics of old decency (Meteor) or psychopaths (Patrick Bergin in When The Sky Falls) it is a real pleasure to see the role go to a woman, and to see Moxley's gently authentic approach. Other characters are equally well drawn - Billy Roche as the most drunken of the town drunks, Pat Shortt as a GAA-loving sadistic teacher, Garret Keogh's university department head, correctly noting that the favoured form of address between university colleagues is 'uh'. Names and titles, being dangerously hierarchical, are rarely used.

There are moments, too, when McPherson's writing and direction transcend the faddish motif. The scenes where a female garda officer carefully investigates a teenage rape incident are well handled. Even Shortt, the archetype of the 'culchie' schoolteacher, given to berating his pupils as 'messers' and 'monkey boys', shows surprising sensitivity when he finds a pupil with a pornographic drawing. "Is that what you think of women, is it?", he enquires: a line that single-handedly gives the character depth beyond the stereotype.

But it is the all-pervasive laddishness in Saltwater that leaves the strongest mark. McPherson, as a director, shows real skill with actors but less visual flair. There is little evidence of the cinematic style that Breathnach gave to I Went Down. For a first film as director, it is better than competent. There are a couple of badly misjudged elements - notably some flashbacks, in saturated colour and wobbly camera home-movie/memory style, to Joe's dead mother. These are trite and superfluous, and could easily be cut. In a different way, a scene where Ray does a DeNiro-esque practice run for a robbery, pointing a gun and talking to himself in the mirror, lacks comic force. It is too obvious a rip-off - and the fact that McDonald's face is hidden by a balaclava drains the shot of a visual focus. At other times McDonald's portrayal of simmering resentment behind a calm facade is excellent. Yet it is Frank, of all the main characters, who seems less than the sum of his parts. Gleeson's Simple Simon and Cox's George are both clearly powerful actors working on real characters, while Mullen is a cartoon representation of the laddism-versus-intellect debate. Of all the strands, the scenes involving Joe and his teenage problems are the most resonant. Saltwater has a slightly mysterious title - neither the sea nor tears are central, and vomit is not usually made of 1-120 + NaCI - and is a very mixed bag indeed. When it is good, it is excellent - and when it isn't, it is callow, trite and laddish beyond words. McPherson's problem is not theatrical: but in his determination to promote simple pleasures and condemn middle-class pseudo-intellectualism, he simply protests too much. Did he have a bad experience in Belfield, or is there a more, well, philosophical explanation?