Sitting through Waking Ned Devine at the 23rd Toronto International Film Festival last Friday afternoon, I felt as if this Irish-set movie was in a foreign language. All around me the audience was convulsed with laughter at the onscreen antics of the largely Irish cast in a movie which was about as authentically Irish as a four-leafed clover. And I got the sinking feeling that this slab of Oirish tosh would be a prominent contender for the People's Choice awards, which are based on votes cast by the Toronto audience after each screening. Sure enough, when the Toronto awards were presented on Sunday afternoon, Waking Ned Devine was right up there in second place - out of a total of 315 movies screened during the 10-day festival. It was pipped for first by Roberto Benigni's artful blending of slapstick and pathos in the Italian wartime comedy Life Is Beautiful, about which I enthused from Cannes in May; third place went to the Brazilian film, Central Station, directed by Walter Salles and warmly received at the Berlin and Galway festivals earlier this year.
In a rare consensus between critics and the public, the Metro Media awards, voted by the 740 accredited journalists at Toronto, featured Life Is Beautiful in second place and Central Station in third. The critics gave first place to Todd Solondz for his brilliant, challenging and controversial picture of a dysfunctional American family in Happiness.
Waking Ned Devine - which failed to figure in the critics' poll - ladles on the blarney in its twee and slender tale of an Irish village, Tullymore, with a population of 52, one of whom wins more than £6 million in the National Lottery. When crafty old codger Jackie O'Shea (played by Ian Bannen) reads this news in The Irish Times, he and his close friend, Michael O'Sullivan (David Kelly) seek out the winner's identity with a view to sharing in the spoils.
Discovering that the winner is the eponymous Ned Devine, and that he died from the shock of learning that he won, the two friends set up a scheme where O'Sullivan will impersonate Devine to collect the winnings. An even more threadbare subplot involves a young single mother (Susan Lynch) torn between two prospective husbands, one of them Finn (James Nesbitt), a pig farmer with a personal hygiene problem. The consequences involve the villagers consuming vast amounts of alcohol at all hours of the day and night and saying "mighty" a lot, as in "murder is a mighty word to use at this time of night", while David Kelly gets saddled with a gratuitous extended nude scene which is played for laughs, and Shaun Davey's score lays on the wistful uileann pipes in the background.
The Toronto festival programme notes how the film "captures the Irish countryside in all its breathtaking splendour" - even though the movie was shot entirely on the Isle of Man. Written and directed by Kirk Jones, an award-winning English commercials director, Waking Ned Devine aspires to the wit and whimsy of the classic Ealing comedies, but delivers only the hoariest of old stage-Irish cliches.
Nevertheless, following a bidding war between distributors, Fox Searchlight paid over $4 million for the US rights to this low-budget film, in the hope of repeating their box-office success last year with The Full Monty. Given the hugely enthusiastic audience response to Waking Ned Devine in Toronto, they may well be right. Perish the thought.
However, it wasn't the worst movie masquerading as Irish at Toronto this year - not when the festival also included Trance, a piece of horror hokum that's daft as a brush. It features Alison Elliott (from The Wings Of A Dove) and Jared Harris as Nora and Jim, a couple of young alcoholics who set out to change their lifestyle by taking a holiday in Nora's native Connemara. "You're going to Ireland to dry out!" exclaims their incredulous doctor (Jason Miller), cueing the laughter of the Toronto audience. Irish audiences will find plenty of laughs, too, when the movie moves to Ireland and Nora and Jim meet up with her crazy uncle, Bill, played in a hilariously over-ripe performance by Christopher Walken with the softest of soft accents. Nora is barely off the plane at Shannon when she's downing a pint of Guinness - "shur, it's like mother's milk to me," she declares - and recalling how she was "shipped off to the States" when she was 16 to have an abortion. A hoot up to the half-way point when it becomes merely a bore, Trance was written and directed by Michael Almereyda, the American film-maker best known for his work in the Pixel-vision medium on Another Girl, Another Planet and Nadja.
Ireland was altogether more impressively represented at Toronto by six other movies, three already covered on these pages, The General, Titanic Town and This Is My Father and another, Dancing At Lughnasa, which is reviewed above. Completing the Irish line-up were the world premieres of two features from Irish directors making their feature debuts.
"You must be all saying it's his first feature and he looks about 94," joked a self-deprecating John Lynch as he introduced his film, Night Train, to an enthusiastic Toronto audience early last Saturday morning. Lynch clocked up decades of experience directing drama at RTE, from The Riordans, Glenroe and Fair City to the RTE/ Channel 4 Love Stories collection, which included A Painful Case and the award-winning Lovers Of The Lake.
Written by the playwright and former Irish Press critic, Aodhan Madden, Night Train features John Hurt as Poole, a middle-aged minor criminal released from prison and on the run from a sadistic gangster (Lorcan Cranitch). Seeking sanctuary in the Dublin suburbs, he rents a room in the home of an inquisitive widow, Mrs Mooney (Pauline Flanagan), and her mousey daughter Alice (Brenda Blethyn). Living next door to Alice and her mother is the even nosier Winnie (Rynagh O'Grady) whose husband (Peter Caffrey) is revealed as the crossdresser who has been stealing Alice's underwear off the clothes line.
Madden's screenplay subtly brings together these two lonely people in a relationship threatened by the ghosts of Poole's past. Shot mostly in Dublin, the film incorporates footage shot on location in Venice and aboard the Orient Express.
Despite its criminal backgrounding, Night Train is essentially a low-key character study which is allowed to breathe and develop under John Lynch's unshowy, sure-footed direction. And he elicits touching, precisely judged performances from the two remarkably versatile actors at his film's centre, John Hurt and Brenda Blethyn. Brendan Gleeson flew in from Vancouver - where he is filming with Bridget Fonda - for a hectic weekend in Toronto where he featured in The General, which had its North American unveiling at the festival, and in Sweety Barrett, which was given its world premiere there. An engagingly off-beat morality fable which marks an auspicious feature debut for its Irish writer-director, Stephen Bradley, Sweety Barrett is set in the fictional town of Dockery, a rundown port populated by eccentrics; the film was shot largely in Balbriggan, Co Dublin.
Brendan Gleeson plays Sweety Barrett, a shambling, bewildered-looking man, one of life's innocents. Losing his sword-swallowing job in a circus, he turns up in Dockery and finds himself working for smugglers ruled by Bone (Liam Cunningham), an unscrupulous corrupt detective. Sweety befriends a six-year-old boy (promising newcomer Dylan Murphy) and his mother (Lynda Steadman), whose husband (Andy Serkis) is in prison. When Bone's evil deeds precipitate a catastrophic incident, Sweety, the gentle giant, becomes the angel of vengeance.
Gleeson deservedly received a standing ovation in Toronto for his fascinating portrayal of this naive protagonist with an innate sense of goodness and instinct for survival. In a strong cast, Cunningham also shines as the utterly despicable Bone, a character wholly devoid of redeeming features. Stephen Bradley imaginatively situates their story against a surreal world which heightens the movie's intriguing aspects, and while the inevitable climax is signalled early on in the narrative, its execution retains the simmering tension Bradley builds throughout the film's progress. Sweety Barrett is distinctively photographed by Thomas Mauch, whose many films for Werner Herzog have included Aguirre, Wrath Of God and Fitzcarraldo, and it is accompanied by a fine score by Stephen McKeon.
Michael Dwyer's second report, on the international programme at the Toronto Film Festival, will run on next Friday's Vision page.
