"Mrs Brown" (12) Screen at D'Olier Street, Forum, Omniplex, Ormonde, UCI, Virgin, Dublin There is a morbid topicality about today's release of John Madden's moving, beautifully acted film, Mrs Brown. It is set 100 years ago, and not only does it open with a haughty British royal family deep in mourning after the death of a prince, it later depicts Victorian paparazzi furtively observing the queen and her male companion on a private picnic.
Madden's intimate, low-key film details the close bond formed between the widowed Queen Victoria and her late husband's devoted Scottish servant, the hunting guide, John Brown. As the film opens, it is 1864 and the queen remains disconsolate in her third year of official mourning. Nobody - none of her nine children, loyal staff and admiring public - can lift her depression until John Brown is summoned to her estate on the Isle of Wight where his brother, Archie, is a member of the household staff. "I speak as I find," John Brown declares bluntly, to which Archie replies, "Not down south you don't". But he does, and John's directness extends to the queen herself - "Lift your foot, woman," he orders as he helps her on to her horse. Victoria seems to surprise herself when his gregarious - and at the same time, genuinely caring - approach thaws her out and wins her over, leading to some spirited verbal sparring between the two of them.
The benign influence John Brown gradually exerts over Victoria eventually incurs resentment in her own household, especially from the ambitious and charmless Prince of Wales - and in official quarters, resulting in personal and physical attacks on Brown and in Victoria being described privately by the snide, Machiavellian prime minister, Disraeli, as "Mrs Brown".
Working from an eloquent original screenplay by Jeremy Brock, director John Madden, a veteran of television and the theatre, deftly draws a warm and touching picture of an unlikely friendship. And he elicits luminous performances from the potentially unlikely pairing of his film's leading actors - a radiant and subtle Judi Dench in, incredibly, her first major film role, as Victoria, and the comedian, Billy Connolly, in a revelatory performance as John Brown. The fine supporting cast includes Anthony Sher as Disraeli, Gerard Butler as Archie, and Geoffrey Palmer as the queen's bureaucratic private secretary, Henry Ponsonby. Michael Dwyer
"Long Day's Journey Into Night" (12) IFC, Dublin At the Toronto Film Festival exactly one year ago this weekend, the young Canadian director David Wellington explained the origins of his new film version of Eugene O'Neill's autobiographical play, Long Day's Journey Into Night. He said he was so "awestruck" by the 1994 stage production of the play at the Stratford Festival in Ontario that he saw it 15 times, and he seized the the opportunity when it arose to direct a movie of the play with the Stratford cast.
The result is an accomplished, impeccably acted film of a difficult play from a director who showed a good deal of promise with his debut film, the quirky, psychological thriller I Love A Man In Uniform, in which an introverted bank teller and parttime actor is transformed by the uniform and personality of the police officer he is cast to play in a television series. The tone is darker and the mood even more oppressive in Wellington's respectful and mature treatment of the O'Neill play, an emotionally wrenching film which builds in simmering power. The time is 1912 and the setting is the Connecticut summer home of a definitively dysfunctional IrishAmerican family. The paterfamilias James Tyrone is a retired Broadway actor, a miser and an alcoholic. His edgy wife, Mary, is addicted to the morphine she received as treatment for a nervous condition and she speaks in a rambling, streamof-consciousness mode. Their insecure and embittered older son, Jamie, has failed to follow in his father's footsteps as an actor but has inherited his drink problem. Based by O'Neill on himself, the frail younger son, Edmund, is a poet who shares that taste for drink and is suffering from consumption. The only other character seen on screen is the family's Irish maid, Cathleen.
The long day begins after breakfast with the first row between Mary and Jamie. Looming over the family is Edmund's appointment in the afternoon when his illness will be diagnosed. The men have their first Jack Daniels of the day as an aperitif before lunch. Meanwhile, the inter-family squabbling and sniping continues in waves, subsides briefly before raging again. As day journeys into night and passions are fuelled further by drink, this family forever haunted by its past rips itself apart. Accumulated bitterness is released in a torrent of recriminations, frustrations, illusions and self-deceptions. Yet it is a story not devoid of hope, and one cannot avoid caring for its distraught characters.
Wellington resolutely restricts the drama within the walls of the Tyrone home. When Mary looks out the window and describes the neighbourhood activity, the camera does not look out for us; when the men go into town for Edmund's medical appointment, the camera does not follow them, however much the audience might crave the relief of an escape, however brief, from the uptight confines of the Tyrone house. In this way Wellington infuses the play with a claustrophobic intensity which consistently engages the audience and is not relieved until the very last shot of the three-hour film.
While that approach may well suggest a firmly stagebound film of O'Neill's play, it works ultimately to its advantage, and no stage production could hope to catch the pain delineated on the faces of the characters as Wellington observes them in telling, almost cruel close-ups. Those characters are played by an ensemble of exemplary actors led by William Hutt, Canada's leading classical actor, as James Tyrone, with Martha Henry as his wife, Peter Donaldson as Jamie, and Tom McCamus, who played the lead in I Love A Man In Uniform, as Edmund. They are more than a match for Ralph Richardson, Katharine Hepburn, Jason Robards and Dean Stockwell who played the Tyrone family in Sidney Lumet's memorable 1962 film of the same play. Michael Dwyer
"Night Falls On Manhattan" (15), Virgin, Savoy
Sydney Lumet is back on his favourite beat, teasing and unravelling a tightly-wound knot of police corruption, crime and political power-games in New York. In the long and prolific career of this 73-year-old writer-director there have inevitably been a few duds, but more importantly, a string of accomplished films such as Serpico, Twelve Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon, The Verdict, Prince of The City and Q&A.
Night Falls On Manhattan explores some of Lumet's favourite themes - moral dilemmas, family ties, corruption - with assurance, in a direct, unadorned, dramadocumentary style. Drug-dealing and racism form the backdrop to the story of a talented young district attorney, Sean Casey (Andy Garcia) whose loyalty to his father, a policeman (Ian Holm), clashes with an investigation into police corruption. Catapulted into the limelight through his prosecution of a notorious drug-dealer and killer, Casey is elected District Attorney and realises that the position draws him into areas of moral ambiguity for which he is completely unprepared. When, in the final scenes, Lumet hammers home his central point - that there are no absolutes, that everyone must inhabit the grey areas of moral ambiguity - the didacticism is both excessive and superfluous: he has already managed to show this on screen through his mastery of dramatic structure and convincing characterisation, and his ability to bring out the best from his cast. From explosive prologue to a muted but hopeful epilogue, the narrative form is carefully worked out, with the action gradually closing in from scenes of street violence to courtroom drama to emotional dilemmas - all arranged around a series of relationships that force Sean Casey to make choices. The element of personal conflict is overloaded by his affair with an assistant attorney (Lena Olin) from the prosecuting side of the trial, and this is the weakest strand of the narrative. Her character is not developed beyond supplying the requisite love interest, delivering the worst lines in the film while being an absolute treasure in the kitchen. Her boss, a human rights lawyer, is wonderfully played by Richard Dreyfuss, who brings depth and wry humour to what could easily have been a stereotype. A former 1960s radical, he has lost his idealism without succumbing to cynicism - instead he has attained a blend of clearsighted worldliness and wisdom. The same could be said of this film. Helen Meany
"Austin Powers International Man of Mystery" (15s) Nationwide The latest comedy from Mike Myers of Wayne's World fame starts so brilliantly that it can only go downwards, which it proceeds to do gently but forgiveably for the following 90 minutes. Opening on a musical pastiche of Swinging London 30 years ago, the hilarious choreography blends the teenybopper hysteria of Hard Day's Night with the cockney cartwheels of Lionel Bart's Oliver! Myers plays Austin Powers, international playboy with a sideline in espionage, with great gusto, clad in velveteen loons and psychedelic blouses. Unfortunately, within five minutes he's been cryogenically frozen, and wakes up in 1997 to save the world from the Blofeld-esque Dr Evil (Myers again). From there on we're in the same terrain as the Brady Bunch movies, beset by jokes about the disjunction between the promiscuous Sixties and the uptight Nineties, as represented by Liz Hurley.
All this is enjoyable enough, in a Naked Gun sort of way, although one suspects that Myers's sights are set higher, perhaps on the farces turned out by Peter Sellers in the 1960s. But although he may not have anything like Sellers's inspired absurdism, his TV sketch style can still raise a few laughs. There's a wonderful sight gag featuring Burt Bacharach, one of the many stars who makes a cameo appearance. Carrie Fisher, Rob Lowe and Christian Slater are among those who pop up for a few seconds, while there are more substantial roles for Robert Wagner and for Michael York, as the splendidly-named Basil Exposition.
We're so used to seeing Brits satirising Americans that it's rather good fun to watch a Canadian like Myers reversing the process, but the Austin Powers persona is ultimately a thin disguise for the same old schtick he purveyed in Wayne's World - those cheesy grins to camera are a dead giveaway. That said, there are enough good gags to keep most people happy, and the script is a lot better than in Myers's last film, the woeful So I Married An Axe Murderer. The rather fine soundtrack includes tunes from Bacharach, Nancy Sinatra, and Tony Hatch. Hugh Linehan
"Portraits Chinois" (15s) Screen on D'Olier Street The bourgeois comedy of manners is a staple of the French cinema, but there haven't been too many inspiring examples in recent years, and the latest film from Martine Dugowson, who made the likeable and perceptive Mina Tan- nenbaum, is deeply disappointing. Following the lives of nine Parisian friends - fashion designers, writers and film-makers - over the course of two emotionally turbulent years, Dugowson fails to make us care in the slightest about these self-obsessed, rather shallow characters, who rarely seem to have anything interesting to say to each other. A talented cast, including Jean-Claude Brialy, Helena Bonham-Carter and Romane Bohringer, struggle in vain with the unpromising material, and Dugowson's evocation of an upper-middle class urban environment is unconvincing. Hugh Linehan
