"Dancing At Lughnasa" (General) On general release
"This is not Africa, it's Ballybeg," Kate Mundy tells her brother, Jack, a priest dazed and confused from the culture shock of returning home to Donegal after years of working abroad as a missionary. The period is the summer of 1936 and Ballybeg is an archetypal Irish rural town of the time, conservative and neighbour-conscious, and stricken by unemployment and emigration.
The focus of Dancing At Lughnasa, Pat O'Connor's superbly crafted and deeply moving film of the Tony award-winning play by Brian Friel - first staged at the Abbey Theatre in 1990 - is on five women whose lives are changed indelibly during that cataclysmic summer. They are the Mundy sisters, none of them married and all of them struggling to keep their remote farm home going through harsh economic times.
Meryl Streep plays Kate, a schoolteacher and the eldest of the sisters, an outwardly strong and firm but inwardly brittle and vulnerable woman whose stiff upper lip clearly longs to allow itself tremble when the pressure comes on, as it does.
Her sisters are played by Kathy Burke, as the good-humoured earth mother figure, Maggie; Brid Brennan, returning to the role of the practical and quietly courageous Agnes which won her a Tony award when she played it on Broadway; Sophie Thompson as the simple but fearless Rose, who is secretly involved with a local married man (Lorcan Cranitch); and Catherine McCormack as the youngest sister, Christina, a single mother with a young son, Michael (Darrell Johnston).
A melancholy meditation on the place and prospects of women in the patriarchal society of those times, the story draws a warm and enthralling picture of the close bonds which link the five sisters, and the love they all shower on young Michael. The boy's father, Gerry (Rhys Ifans), is a sporadic feature in Michael's life, a happy-go-lucky Welshman who, on a rare visit, says he's giving dancing lessons in Dublin and planning to go to Spain and fight for the International Brigade against Franco.
The consequential events of that summer are recalled with hindsight in the narration of the grown-up Michael (voiced by Gerard McSorley), beginning with the unsettling changes in Jack when he returns, and the drama hinges on the twin threats to the Mundy family's basic economic security.
Kate's morale is shattered when she learns that her teaching job is on the line because of declining class numbers, and the sisters' income from knitting and sewing is threatened by the imminent opening of a knitting factory in the area. Loving family ties are about to become torn apart by circumstances entirely outside the sisters' control.
In among these cruel realities, there are moments of joy, too - the most exuberant cued by the family's erratic first radio which finally bursts forth with energetic ceili music, prompting all five sisters to let loose in a thrilling, joyous dance sequence which begins indoors before moving out into the more liberating open space of the backyard, bathed in the glow of the early evening sunlight. Even Kate, a woman to whom spontaneity seems like an alien concept, lets her hair down and, after a tentative reluctance, joins in.
Brian Friel's marvellous play is transposed to the screen in a judicious and succinct adaptation by Frank McGuinnss which, in essence, remains faithful to the play yet opens out its parameters without ever appearing to force the narrative in those directions.
Returning to the territory of his superb William Trevor film, The Ballroom Of Romance (albeit in a setting two decades earlier), director Pat O'Connor achieves his most accomplished and most sensitively achieved work to date. His long-evident skill with actors never has been demonstrated to such dramatic effect, and one of the film's crowning achievements is the remarkable, wholly unselfish ensemble acting of the five women at the film's centre. It would be truly invidious to single out any of these quite exemplary players whose casting has proved to be inspired.
O'Connor's key creative team delivers oustanding work: lighting cameraman Kenneth McMillan, on his fifth film for the director; production designer Mark Geraghty, costume designer Joan Bergin, film editor Humphrey Dixon and composer Bill Whelan whose elegant score explodes into life to drive the exhilarating sequence when the sisters dance together.
This treatment of Dancing At Lughnasa makes for a spellbinding experience, a film to savour and one which registers all the more powerfully on a second viewing.
"The Spanish Prisoner" (PG) Screen at D'Olier Street, Dublin
Deceptively straightword at first and deliciously clever all the way, The Spanish Prisoner marks David Mamet's fifth and arguably most satisfying film as writer and director. Mamet's sly, eloquent screenplay teasingly reveals the narrative in a movie which returns him to the confidence tricksters' milieu of his directing debut, House Of Games.
Campbell Scott plays Joe Ross, an honest, trusting man who devises a lucrative invention for the mysterious company which employs him. However, he fears that the company will steal the invention from him and cut him out of the very substantial profits which surely will ensue. His anxiety is heightened when he meets Jimmy Dell (Steve Martin), a suave, high-living entrepreneur. They first encounter each other on the Caribbean island of St Estephe where Bell approaches Ross and offers him $1,000 for his camera. It is Bell who queries just how appreciative Ross's employers are of his work. Rebecca Pidgeon plays Susan Ricci, the company's new secretary who increases Ross's insecurity as she ponders the movie's recurring theme, "Who in this world is what they seem?". It would be unfair to relate any more of the smart storyline of this tantalising movie which doesn't even explain its title until an hour in, as the plot thickens. Suffice to say that the craftily plotted narrative is strewn with unexpected puzzles and diversions, as Mamet tosses the audience crumbs of clues along the way.
The stimulating pleasure of the movie is all in this participation, in sharing in the unravelling of this information, whether accurate, helpful or misleading, all set against the paranoid world Mamet depicts so persuasively. This droll entertainment is expertly played by a fine cast in which Steve Miller, who is on rare form, and the often underestimated Campbell Scott are also joined by Ben Gazzara, Ricky Jay and Felicity Huffman.
"There's Something About Mary" (15) General release
Taste, to paraphrase Mae West, has nothing to do with There's Something About Mary, a calculatedly provocative romantic comedy which has something to offend just about everybody. Anyone who has seen Dumb And Dumber and Kingpin, the previous pictures from the directing team of brothers Bobby and Peter Farrelly, will have an idea of what to expect. In this, the least PC movie since, well, Kingpin, Cameron Diaz is characteristically radiant as Mary Jensen, an effervescent young woman who becomes the object of desire for a number of men, beginning with the angst-ridden Ted Stroehmann (Ben Stiller), who, in the film's prologue when they are both 17, can't believe his luck when she agrees to be his date at the senior prom.
Ted is the movie's hapless straight man and the butt of its often gross and sometimes hilarious humour, particularly in an extended sequence in which his prom plans are thwarted when he has a painful accident with the zipper on his trousers - in full view of Mary's family and, in a brief nod to Boogie Nights, of the cinema audience.
Another even more outrageous extended visual gag involves Ted's semen, his left ear - and Mary's hair. This occurs some time after the movie cuts to the present and Ted, still besotted with Mary after 12 years, hires a private eye, Pat Healy, to trace her. The resolutely sleazy Healy, a pathological liar, is played by Matt Dillon with relish - and a pencil-thin moustache and yellowing teeth.
Some viewers will find There's Something About Mary disgusting in its envelope-pushing humour-poking that crosses far over the line of political correctness; some others may well find themselves laughing out loud at what's depicted in the picture while simultaneously questioning their response. As an exercise in dubious taste, the film is closer in spirit and tone to early John Waters movies than to even Dumb And Dumber, albeit with superior production values. Yet, at heart, it's a good-natured romp rooted in and conceived with a very keen sense of the absurd.
Hugh Linehan adds:
"Double Carpet" (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin It has been frequently noted that a particular problem facing new Irish film-makers lies in developing the skills and experience necessary to direct a feature. While directors in the UK and Europe can often hone their craft in television, the failure of our national broadcaster to develop original drama in the 1980s and most of the 1990s effectively closed this avenue for their Irish equivalents. Reel Time, the scheme for one-hour dramas jointly set up by RTE and the Film Board, was particularly welcome for this reason, although one wonders why the scheme was discontinued after the completion of just two dramas.
Writer-director Mark Kilroy's Double Carpet is one of those films, and it displays an assured sense of story dynamics both in its screenplay and its direction. Set in the world of betting (the title is racing slang for odds of 33/1), this engaging comedy stars Darragh Kelly as an obsessive gambler and Jasmine Russell as his long-suffering girlfriend. Accidentally coming across what seems the ultimate tip, Kelly combines with his gambling cronies (Tom Hickey and Garrett Keogh) to raise as big a stake as possible, with predictably nail-biting consequences.
Kilroy obviously knows his material, and tells his story well, aided in no small part by his strong cast. While Double Carpet is clearly designed primarily for television, its wry comedy also works well on the big screen (and there's too much snobbery about the distinction between the two forms, anyway).
Chris Roche's short thriller Zanzibar, showing on the same bill, is a 25-minute exercise in style which shows a certain grasp of genre conventions without particularly convincing us that there's anything else going on. As such, it's a classic example of the "calling card" syndrome which afflicts a lot of shorts these days.
