April 16–23, 1998
movies
Neil Jordan takes surprising risks in his macabre new film.
by Sam Adams
GOOD-HUMORED PSYCHOSIS: Eamonn Owens and Stephen Rea. |
Directed by Neil Jordan
A Warner Bros. Release
Recommended
The flame-headed 12-year-old protagonist of The Butcher Boy bills himself as "The Incredible Francie Brady!" He's the central character in a series of warped fairy tales that grow darker and more violent as the thin threads which tie him to the world begin to unravel. Working from Patrick McCabe's novel, Neil Jordan shapes his macabre fantasia to fit the contours of this charismatic young maniac's mind.
Born to a penniless family in a small Irish town, Francie (Eamonn Owens) is branded an outsider early on: his father (Steven Rea) is a drunk, and a musician to boot, and his mother (Aisling O'Sullivan) is in and out of mental hospitals. He could try to fit in, but he knows somehow that it would never work, that he'd always be "that Brady boy." So he takes his brash vulgarity and wears it as a badge of honor, and when the priggish, middle-class Mrs. Nugent (Fiona Shaw) brands him "a pig," his destiny is set.
At first, he and his best friend Joe (Alan Boyle) are in it together, but when Francie returns from his first trip to reform school—or as he puts it, "The Incredible School for Pigs!"—Francie's on his own. His mother has killed herself with a noose, his father with whiskey, and Joe has taken up with, of all people, Mrs. Nugent's son Phillip (Andrew Fullerton). So Francie takes a job in a slaughterhouse—killing pigs, of course—and the tale progresses toward its bloody conclusion. Let's just say Francie finds another use for the pig-killing machinery.
The trickiest part of describing The Butcher Boy is sketching the movie's tone, somewhere between E.C. horror comics and Samuel Beckett. Jaunty music and bizarrely accented, almost unbearably upbeat narration (performed by Rea as the voice of an older Francie) give way to passages of hallucinogenic intensity—as when Francie envisions his town after a nuclear attack, with he and Joe the only two left alive, running from a menacing horseman with the head of a giant fly. At first the film seems merely inconsistent, even somewhat irritating, but gradually, you gain a sense of the way the seemingly disparate elements all form a part of the patchwork fabric of Francie's mind. The mixture of comedy and horror is more than gallows humor. It's like the jokes coroners tell each other to keep from being overcome by seeing too much death.
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Eamonn Owens attacks |
McCabe has said that although the novel's events are fictional, its tone is autobiographical, and it's not hard to see The Butcher Boy's bleak comedy as the product of a country where, as historian Tim Pat Coogan once put it, "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as tragedy." There's no firm sense of place to Jordan's film—it's too dreamlike for concrete geography—but far more than Jordan's Michael Collins, The Butcher Boy feels like an Irish film. Michael Collins was a Hollywood film about Irish history; The Butcher Boy is about the Irish soul.
Eamonn Owens was not much older than Francie when The Butcher Boy was shot, and like Patrick McCabe, he grew up in a small town near the border between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland. (McCabe's hometown of Clones was used for exterior shots in the movie.) Good performances by child actors are rare, and finding a lead for a movie with a tone as peculiar as The Butcher Boy—a tone that has to appear to be dictated by Francie's psyche—must have been exceedingly difficult. Nevertheless, Owens finds just the right blend of gregariousness and mania. He attacks the role with the ferocity—and the personalities—of a half-dozen children; he's like a whole sixth-grade class in a little-boy suit. What's most disheartening to the Mrs. Nugents of the world is Francie's refusal to accept his own inferiority. By the mere fact that he refuses to give up, Francie brands himself a lunatic; his unflagging good humor and his psychosis are one and the same. The movie never stoops to "explain" Francie's fantasies. Owens shows us that for all his exterior bravado, Francie's rampages are his way of making up for the fact that he no longer has anyone to interact with.
There's a sense of risk-taking about The Butcher Boy that's utterly uncharacteristic of Jordan's films, which, like Michael Collins or The Crying Game, tend to start with volatile subject matter and systematically neutralize it, laying things out in the simplest of terms, defusing the possibility of genuine conflict. It would be tempting to see The Butcher Boy as Jordan's breakthrough film, but I think it's more likely a singular event, sparked by the challenge of McCabe's novel (as Jordan was not sparked by Interview with the Vampire). Breakthrough films are when a director makes the movie he's always been threatening to make; The Butcher Boy is the movie you can't believe Neil Jordan made.