|
THE BUTCHER BOY Send This Review to a Friend
From the opening cartoon-like credits for THE BUTCHER BOY, which Neil Jordan directed and co-scripted with Patrick McCabe from McCabe's novel, it's clear that we are in for a film with an unusual perspective and style. Jordan delivers with a powerful, unsettling story that has violence at its core but not in its jaunty method.
We are transported quickly into the troubled life of a 12-year-old Irish lad who eventually will commit murder. But the story, set mainly in the early 1960s in an Irish village, works backwards. It's as if we read of a horrible deed in the press and wonder why a young killer reached such a drastic point.
"The Butcher Boy" is blessed with a an ingratiating, unforgettable performance by Eamonn Owens as the troubled Francie, who gets into escalating difficulties while displaying a roguish charm that masks lethal hostilities born of a home life defined by an alcoholic father and a suicidal mother.
Francie feels desperately unloved and every rejection, no matter how minor, is a milestone along his road to destructiveness. Owens makes us like him, even root for him without condoning what he eventually does. Earlier his rebelliousness amounts primarily to sass and mischief , some of it admittedly nasty.
Stephen Rea convincingly plays Francie's father, mostly in a stupor, and later turns up as the older Francie, now minus the piss and vinegar of his boyhood character. Fiona Shaw, Alan Boyle, Sinead O'Connor and Milo O'Shea contribute to the film's sense of authenticity. But Jordan, who has given us such accomplished films as "The Crying Game" and "Mona Lisa," endows his latest with remarkable stature thanks to a masterly blend of quirky humor and an undertone of an impeding explosion of violence that must come as surely as the next day's dawn. "The Butcher Boy" promises to hold up as one of the year's best. A Warner Brothers release.
|