DIR: Neil Jordan • WRI: Neil Jordan, Pat McCabe • PROD: Stephen Woolley, Redmond Morris • DOP: Adrian Biddle • ED: Tony Lawson • DES: Anthony Pratt • CAST: Eamonn Owens, Alan Boyle, Stephen Rea, Fiona Shaw, Andrew Fullerton, Aisling O'Sullivan, Sinéad O'Connor, Rosaleen Linehan, Gina Moxley.
The Butcher Boy is a transposition to the screen as true to its source material as it's possible to get. It's a seamless fusion of the imaginations of Neil Jordan and Pat McCabe, made possible because the territory of McCabe's novel, the music, the boys' imagined world, the dysfunctional family life, the fractured seaside idyll all have their echoes in Jordan's films and writings, particularly his 1976 collection of short stories, 'Night in Tunisia'. Read closely, the stories in that collection may allow a deal of insight into Jordan's films, especially Angel, The Miracle, and Michael Collins. For instance when 'Neil' the narrator of 'A Love', a story set during DeValera's funeral in 1975, says -'I knew I was out of step, it was all militarism now, like air in a blister, under the skin, it was swelling, the militarism I had just learned of before, in the school textbooks' one surely detects the hand that wrote Michael Collins.
The Butcher Boy is only the second adaptation Jordan has filmed, his more usual approach being to write his own screenplays, reworking them over many years. Right at the beginning of his engagement with film, in 1979, talking about stream of consciousness writing and film he said, 'It will be a problem for Irish filmmakers though. The literary writing is so strong that the theme of interior personal experience is going to be primary'. In an interview with Brian McIlroy nine years later, speaking about the films he'd made up to that point, he says 'They are all basically about the clash between the real world and the world of imagination and unreality, the conflict between dreams and reality. The constant concern is to do with realistic and surrealistic explanations of human behaviour and whether human beings answer to rational modes of thought or are inspired by things quite irrational and unknown to themselves.' In the intervening years he had found the cinematic language with which to project characters' interior realities into or onto a real world which spins on a different axis.
In The Butcher Boy this conflict is played out in an epic tragedy as a young boy, Francie Brady (Eamonn Owens), travels further into pshychosis to make for himself a reality that's bearable. The 'real' world of small town life will keep intruding though, and much as he fights against it with increasingly desperate violence his fate is sealed once he loses his friend Joe (Alan Boyle), his last point of contact in his community.
The entry point for the audience is through Pat McCabe's mesmerising language which creates the character of Francie, the litanies of small town life, and the awful gut-wrenching humour contained in Francie's telling of his own story. This retrospective voiceover is, structurally, the riskiest aspect of the film. And if I have any minor reservation I think it arises from the speed of the action which is propelled at an incredible rate by the voiceover. A little variation in the pace might allow an audience more space to engage emotionally with Francie without sentimentalising him.
In every single respect The Butcher Boy represents an enormous maturation in Irish filmmaking. It has no equal here in terms of the confidence or competence with which it's been made and it sets the standard for Irish filmmakers to aspire to better. The acting is uniformly wonderful, especially Eamonn Owens' performance as Francie. The opening titles are perfect and work brilliantly to bring an audience inside Francie's head before they realise it. The film deserves prizes galore certainly, but most of all it deserves large audiences here in Ireland.
Ted Sheehy – Film Ireland 60 (Aug/Sep 1997)
