Neil Jordan mixes storytelling realism and gothic fantasy to create a unique cinematic vision. Looking forward towards The Good Thief, Emer Williams Rockett and Kevin Rockett assess his career.
In terms of cinema and culture, the imminent release of Neil Jordan's 13th feature film, The Good Thief, promises to offer access to a world of intelligent but pleasurable and sumptuous cinematic delights. Set in France (in the seedy underworld of Nice and the more opulent Monte Carlo), it follows the adventures of ageing American gambler Bob (played by Nick Nolte) who, down on his luck, plans to rob a casino.
However, the heist is not straightforward, and in that it mirrors the narrative acrobatics Jordan usually enjoys with film genre and categories of meaning. While The Good Thief is that very postmodern of things, a remake, it manages to make use of, yet transcends, the 1955 original film, Bob le Flambeur by French director Jean-Pierre Melville, on which it is based, and, as Jordan put it, to which it has "an affectionate relationship".
For those familiar with Jordan's creative output this should come as no surprise. His cinematic references are not of the ubiquitous empty, if stylish quotation, but are invariably reworked and imbued with new meaning and significance. The film is typical of Jordan and presents the viewer with images and themes that he explores elsewhere. The Good Thief is also interesting in that it highlights a central aspect of Jordan's cinema which courts national and international (especially American) film industries, while never fully belonging to any of them.
By virtue of its source material, cast, crew, and location, The Good Thief clearly exists within a European rather than a US tradition. As Jordan recently said, "I'm tired of the dominance of American movies over everything, every facet of film-making and cinema-going. I just think it's time to make a move back to Europe. It's time European directors made films with reach, punch and intellectual ambition."
While the film certainly achieves this European "punch", it is not a "pure" project in the sense of being non-American, but occupies the cultural interstices and rides the contradictions as well as recognising the complementary aspects of both cinemas. With predominantly Canadian money, Jordan has created a European movie produced both in reaction to and as homage to American cinema.
Unquestionably, Jordan ranks as Ireland's most prolific and versatile - not to mention commercially successful - film-maker whose career as writer and director spans three decades. This engagement with the literary and cinematic is important; he walks a tightrope between narrative and meaning, or a literary cinema, on the one hand, and a visual and acoustic cinema on the other. Interestingly, Jordan entitled his first piece of critical writing on cinema, "Word and Image".
He wrote this in 1978 when only a handful of Irish films were being made, but these initiated what became within little over a decade an internationally-acclaimed cinema, by which time Jordan was to the forefront of that Irish cinema. In his article, Jordan noted that while the most prominent screen images about Ireland had concerned the Northern Ireland Troubles, other images of Irish experience had found expression only in the written word. In common with many Irish commentators he suggested that "if one were to anticipate what form these images will take, when they eventually are filmed, one would have to examine the literary medium, through which the shapes of Irish experience have been most thoroughly and brilliantly drawn". He also noted that the "best achievements" of indigenous Irish cinema, Bob Quinn's formally experimental Caoineadh Airt Ui Laoire (1975) and Cathal Black's more realist Wheels, the film which Jordan was reviewing, took their impetus from literary works.
This endorsement of an Irish cinema which is informed at one level by a modernist engagement with the past, and on another, the literary "realist" tradition, brings into focus the tension which is at the core of Jordan's film work. Nevertheless, it was the Irish modernist (as well as the "surreal" and gothic) literary tradition which he promoted in 1978. Thus, while Wheels examined the world portrayed in the Irish short story, another Irish "imaginative" landscape, mapped out by James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, Jonathan Swift and Samuel Beckett, waited to be engaged with. While suggesting that this latter strain might not be as easily analysed as the former, he observed that "its myths, its obsessions and its metaphysics are as much part of our heritage as is the concrete landscape" of the short story. If "the attempt by film to depict that world would be infinitely more difficult", it would also be "infinitely more rewarding".
This proved to be Jordan's approach four years later when he made his first feature film, Angel, in which he explores both the "realism" and "fantasy" of the Irish experience, while opening up a series of cinematic spaces for Irish cinema. As he said of The Crying Game (1992), but which could describe almost all of his films, "I like to take stories that have a realistic beginning, that start from the point of realism and go to some other place that is surrealistic." He added that Irish people had "a certain impatience with reality", and pointed to the strength of the fantastic rather than realistic Irish literature. Such impatience is most evident in the premise of his gothic farce, High Spirits (1988). In order for Angel to be possible and for Jordan to concentrate on film-making he put aside his already-successful career as a writer (Night in Tunisia and Other Stories, 1976, and the novel The Past, 1980), not least because he felt that he had already exhausted the medium. Describing The Past as being entirely composed of visual description, Jordan explained that he was "writing himself out of \ form entirely". Nevertheless, as an alternative artistic expression to cinema, he has published two further novels, Dream of a Beast (1983) and Sunrise with Sea Monster (1994), and is writing another.
Though set in Northern Ireland, Angel is less concerned with formal politics than with a "metaphysics of violence" and signals Jordan's favouring of the personal or psychic over the public. Its visually impressive opening sequence at the "Dreamland" ballroom registers that the film is already leaving behind the grim reality of sectarian politics to see how such events impinge on the individual - in this case on saxophonist Danny, played by Stephen Rea in the first of eight appearances in Jordan's films.
Many other Jordan films, including the adult version of Little Red Riding Hood, Company of Wolves (1983), the contemporary British film noir, Mona Lisa (1984), or even The Crying Game and the Oedipal fairyworld of In Dreams (1999), start off with such realist elements and go on to enter the fantastic or the gothic, as happens in the otherwise wholly different High Spirits and Interview with the Vampire (1994). In Jordan's most commercially-successful film, Interview with the Vampire, an adaptation of Anne Rice's 1976 cult novel, another of Jordan's themes is evident: the often grotesque nuclear family. In this case it is figured as vampires played by Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and Kirsten Dunst. In his earlier The Miracle (1991), one of his finest films, the discourse around the family is even more explicit. Based on his short story, "Night in Tunisia", it has mother and son wrapped in an incestuous embrace, while the dysfunctional is the main subject of the superbly kinetic The Butcher Boy (1997), his adaptation of Patrick McCabe's incisive and popular novel.
Despite an eclectic and diverse output, his films share common preoccupations whether in his interest in the border between reality and fantasy, or the family and Oedipal configurations, caught up in a web of confused or developing sexuality. Equally, if more abstractly, much, if not all of Jordan's work delights in the relationships between rationality and irrationality (often worked through in terms of religion or the supernatural) and perception and appearance. Jordan's work also has recurring motifs. For example, The Butcher Boy and The Miracle, as well as his adaptation of Graham Greene's novel The End of the Affair (1999), are either set by the sea or their characters search for their origins there. "I cannot end a film without reaching the sea," Jordan has said, but these characters' search for innocence, childhood or the purity of love often fails there. When Bob Hoskins walks Brighton Pier in Mona Lisa, he knows the possibility of love and transformation is denied to him, just as in The Butcher Boy, Francie realises that he, too, has lost everything when he screams on Bundoran strand. In contrast, Bob and his young consort Anne in The Good Thief find peace and happiness at Monte Carlo's seafront. Not only has Bob beaten the casino, but unlike either Melville's Bob or the protagonists, young or old, of other Jordan films, the couple do enjoy the elusive fairytale ending.
Neil Jordan remains Ireland's most versatile and cinematically imaginative filmmaker who manages to address Irish culture while transcending the limitations it might impose. Working across and within many genres and production contexts he produces a cinema which could be described as a synergy between word, image and music, with the latter often acting as a counterpoint or complement to both, in that it usually provides an emotional and narrative thread as well as sumptuous aural texture.
Neil Jordan: Exploring Boundaries by Emer Williams Rockett and Kevin Rockett, will be published by The Liffey Press on February 19th. It is the first full-length study of Neil Jordan's creative output with a chapter devoted to each of his films. A retrospective of Neil Jordan's films is currently being screened at the Irish Film Centre.