REVIEWED - THE TIGER'S TAIL Something is rotten in the state of Ireland - so says veteran director John Boorman in his biting new comedy-thriller, writes Michael Dwyer
THE week ends as it began, in introspection on our national identity. On Monday night, David McWilliams introduced his TV series, In Search of the Pope's Children, examining the phenomenon of the Celtic Tiger and its consequences in conspicuous consumption, dashboard dining and social climbing.
While McWilliams was saying that we've never had it so good, albeit with qualifications, writer-director and longtime Wicklow resident John Boorman expresses a contrary view in The Tiger's Tail, a dark comedy-thriller that offers a caustic commentary on the new Ireland that is a world away from the Oirish fantasy paraded in Waking Ned and The Boys and Girl from County Clare, which were as authentically Irish as their Isle of Man locations.
Working on his fourth film for Boorman, Brendan Gleeson plays the protagonist, self-made millionaire Liam O'Leary. O'Leary is a property developer determined to build an ultra-modern sports stadium in Dublin, and quite prepared to bribe a government minister and members of the city council to advance his plans.
O'Leary's office looks across the Liffey to the Irish Financial Services Centre. He lives in a mansion behind electronic gates with his wife (Kim Cattrall), who arrives home laden with designer shopping, and their teenaged son (played by Briain Gleeson, the actor's real-life son) who espouses Marxist-Leninist pretensions while living a life of leisure, golf and skiing.
"We've got the Celtic Tiger by the tail," O'Leary declares as he accepts an industry enterprise award at a black-tie ceremony. "If we let it go, it will turn around and bite us."
Earlier that evening, while stuck in the city's gridlocked traffic, O'Leary is convinced that he sees his double staring through the windscreen - an unkempt, angrier lookalike. This incident and subsequent events force O'Leary to question his own identity and to re-evaluate his life, while Boorman reaches for the scalpel to probe our national identity in an unsparing dissection of the malaises he perceives in modern Ireland.
A priest (Ciaran Hinds), who runs a shelter for the homeless, remarks to O'Leary, an old friend, that "the more homes you build, the more homeless there are". A sequence shot in Temple Bar shows a young woman vomiting in the street, two young men violently kicking another on the ground, and a plush bar where the Dort-speaking patrons consume cocaine and ecstasy.
The movie saves its most scathing attack for a sequence set in the A&E department of a Dublin hospital, which resembles a scene from a horror movie. In this chaos there are long queues, faces covered in blood, strung-out drug addicts, fights contained by security staff, and corridors lined on both sides with patients on trolleys.
Boorman's robust film effectively brings the national conversation to the screen, and drips with cynicism as he infuses the narrative with his disillusionment with his adopted country. It is not a subtle film, and not all of the points it makes are convincing, as when Boorman attributes the alarming rise in young male suicides to a protest against the radical changes in Irish society.
The most unsettling scene in the movie, however, is not drawn from observations of contemporary Ireland, but from the film's fictional storyline, when a sex scene disturbingly borders on rape. There is a point to that sequence, but the narrative could have proceeded just as efficiently without it. Meanwhile, the film marks changing sexual attitudes in this country through a scene of family reunion that harks back to the repression, fear and conservatism of the not too distant past.
Gleeson bestrides the movie with authority and subtlety, and the strong supporting cast notably features touching performances from Sinead Cusack and Moira Deady in this biting, potent parable.
