A Love Divided General release
Given its world premiere in Dublin last night, Syd Macartney's chilling and arresting drama, A Love Divided, chronicles a shocking true story of bitter sectarian conflict which happened in this country as recently as 42 years ago. The result is an eye-opening and valuable dramatisation of a cautionary tale, rendered all the more startling by the fact that it's true.
Set in the Wexford seaside village of Fethard-on-Sea, the film opens on idyllic images of the Cloney family, Sean and Sheila and their two little daughters. Life for them might well have continued to be so contented but for the fact that theirs was a mixed marriage - Sean, a Catholic, and Sheila, a Protestant.
As Sheila observes in voiceover, this was a place where on Sundays there was "a place for everyone and everyone in their place" - the Catholics at their church up the hill, the dwindling Protestant population at their service down below - but it took just one incident to split that community apart and unleash intolerance.
That incident begins almost casually when the parish priest, Fr Stafford, observes that the older of the two Cloney daughters is of school-going age and that he expects her to enrol at the local Catholic school. A strong-willed woman not easily ordered about, Sheila Cloney takes exception to his assumptions and insists that this is a decision to be taken solely by her and her husband.
When the pressure on her intensifies, Sheila takes her two daughters and disappears from Fethardon-Sea. Outraged, Fr Stafford accuses the local vicar of conspiracy in the "kidnapping" and calls for a boycott on all the Protestants in the village until the children are returned. "It's not over you," Sean later tells his wife. "It's always been there under the surface, waiting for an excuse."
While Syd Macartney's riveting film dramatises the horrific consequences of this boycott - which was supported by the country's bishops - it never loses sight of the massive strain it imposed on the Cloneys individually and together, on their marriage and on their children. As Carol Coulter pointed out in this newspaper last weekend, the screenplay's dramatic compression of the story omits the reverberations of the boycott on the rest of Ireland, north and south, and it underplays Sean Cloney's own firm, unambiguous opposition to the boycott.
However, neither those cavils nor the film's essentially televisual style, which betrays its origins, diminish the smouldering power with which this drama builds, while having the courage to rein in its inevitable indignation. Indeed, that visual style, with its regular recourse to cutting between close-ups, has its dramatic advantages when the close-ups frame such an excellent cast.
Playing Sean Cloney, Liam Cunningham perfectly catches the love his character clearly feels for his wife and children, the yearning in his eyes when he is parted from them, and the humiliation to which he is subjected by the parish priest. A relative newcomer to film roles, Orla Brady vividly etches Sheila's personality in all its stubbornness, determination and vulnerability.
In an exemplary supporting cast that includes Jim Norton, Eileen Pollock, Garrett Keogh, Ger Ryan and John Kavanagh, Peter Caffrey is outstanding as the village's sole atheist, the resilient owner of a local pub. Nevertheless, the core of the drama is charged by the singularly scary portrayal of the driven parish priest by Tony Doyle as a wholly insular man who browbeats with a smile and who absolutely believes he is doing the right thing.
"People say the past is another country," Sheila Cloney notes in the very early stages of A Love Divided. "When I look at the photographs of Sean, me and the girls, it seems like another world." And so it does.
By Michael Dwyer
Best Laid Plans (18) Selected cinemas
Nothing is quite as it seems in Mike Barker's visually stylish and generally unpredictable thriller, Best Laid Plans. Set in a dead-end American town called Tropico, it opens as Bryce (Josh Brolin), a newcomer to the area, is accused of rape by a young woman (Renee Witherspoon) he meets in a bar. He calls his old college friend, Nick (Alessandro Nivola) to discuss his predicament.
There follows an extended flashback to four months earlier, in which the background to the opening set-up is gradually exposed as a tangled plot of greed and double-crossing triggered off by a chance encounter on the day of Nick's father's funeral - at which, significantly, Nick is the only mourner.
The rather convoluted consequences are best revealed in the film, as they are, layer by layer, in the mostly satisfying scheme of things devised by first-time screenwriter Theodore Griffin. Griffin has clearly has been influenced by Quentin Tarantino, as has the movie's British director, Mike Barker, whose first feature, The James Gang, went directly to video here. Barker elicits convincing performances from his three principal players, especially Nivola, who played Nicolas Cage's brother in Face/Off, and the movie is accompanied by a solid score from Craig Armstrong.
By Michael Dwyer
The Idiots (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
Much the worst movie selected for competition at Cannes last year, Lars von Trier's tiresome and vacuous The Idiots was deservedly overshadowed by the other Danish entry at Cannes, Thomas Vinterberg's Festen which, like The Idiots, was made under the no-frills dictum of the Dogma 95 manifesto.
Von Trier's pseudo-anarchic film assembles a motley crew of wasters who share a large house and spend their time behaving idiotically or provocatively, generally at the expense of outsiders who, like the movie's audience, never quite get in on the supposed joke.
One pretends to be stupid in order to avoid paying the bill in a cafe; another sports an erection in the communal showers of a swimming pool. And their - and the film's - attitude to a group of people with Down's Syndrome is deeply patronising.
A huge disappointment from von Trier after his achievements with Breaking The Waves and The Kingdom, this shrill, inane and banal effort is shot in a rudimentary, hand-held style with the boom regularly slipping into the frame. Von Trier attempts to spice up the concoction with liberal helpings of nudity and even a brief scene of sexual penetration. Those attempts to shock register as merely juvenile, and the film's strained attempts at humour caused me to laugh out loud just once during its two-hour duration.
By Michael Dwyer
True Crime (15) General release
In his forthcoming film, Celeb- rity, Woody Allen casts Kenneth Branagh as an Allen doppelganger; a fast-talking, neurotic writer with a taste for beautiful young women. It's a belated recognition by Allen that, at 64, his days as a credible romantic lead are gone for ever. What, then, to make of Clint Eastwood who, at 69, still seems to believe that he can credibly play a character accustomed to having women a third of his age falling at his feet?
As a director Eastwood is never less than competent, and he handles this legal drama, set over the course of the 24 hours leading up to the execution of a convicted murderer, with typical confidence and style.
But in choosing to play the boozy, womanising local journalist who is assigned to write a "human interest sidebar" on the case - which soon turns into a crusade to prove the condemned man's innocence - Eastwood has finally taken a role too far, stepping into shoes that would far better fit a man 20 years younger (at least). It's just impossible to believe in his portrayal of the character, and the way in which the supporting cast hurl insults at him (he's unreliable, he's a drunk, he's unfaithful to his wife . . .), without ever mentioning the fact that he's clearly at a age when even judges contemplate retirement, leaves True Crime looking like the kind of soft-focus vanity project which has made Robert Redford look such a fool in recent years.
That might be a little unfair - Eastwood has always been a far more interesting, charismatic and conic actor than Redford, and even here he manages to invest some of his scenes with dramatic urgency. Its a shame, though, that the film's main sub-plot - the testosterone-charged conflict between Eastwood, his immediate superior at the newspaper (Denis Leary), and the cynical, hard-bitten editor (James Woods) is so undermined by the implausible casting. After all, with the right script, you couldn't choose a better trio of actors to portray office machismo.
By Hugh Linehan
