| THE CRYING SHAME : Neil Jordan's 'Breakfast on Pluto' [3/10] |
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| Friday, 23 December 2005 | |
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His multiple Oscar nominations - and Best Original Screenplay win for The Crying Game - notwithstanding, Neil Jordan has always been one of the more erratic 'big-name' film-makers from the British Isles. After the fair-to-middling End of the Affair and the ho-hum Good Thief, Breakfast On Pluto depressingly confirms the Sligo-born sometime novelist's decline as a creative force - in fact, it's strong evidence that the process is rapidly accelerating. Because this is a quite bafflingly, thuddingly inept filming of Patrick McCabe's 1998 novel. Named after a briefly-popular late-sixties novelty single by 'King of the Buskers' Don Partridge, it was McCabe's second work to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize following The Butcher Boy - which was filmed by Jordan in 1997 with a cast including Stephen Rea, Ian Hart, Brendan Gleeson and Eamonn Owens. These familiar faces all pop up again in Pluto, along with Liam Neeson (who last worked with Jordan on Michael Collins) and, making his belated feature-film debut, Bryan Ferry. All are relegated to supporting roles of greater or lesser significance, however, as the movie is primarily and emphatically a showcase for fast-rising star Cillian Murphy - whose eyecatching performance as transvestite Patrick 'Kitten' Braden has been nominated for a Golden Globe (Best Actor, Comedy/Musical). We follow Kitten from his birth and schooldays in the northern Irish (as opposed to Northern Irish) town of Cavan, through his troubled adolescence, and into early adulthood when he treks to England in search of the mother who abandoned him as a baby. Consciously "different" from a very early age, the Candide-like Kitten wafts through life on a cloud of glamour and sequins - his progress only occasionally interrupted by his becoming caught up in the political tumult of his times. Because most of the action in Breakfast on Pluto takes place around 1970-1974, when the politics of Ireland - 'north' and 'south' - were entering a particularly difficult and violent phase... This timeframe gives the three credited art-directors (Michael Higgins, Mark Lowry, Denise Schnegg), costume-designer Eimer Ni Mhaoldomhnaigh, production designer Tom Conroy and make-up artist Felicity Wright the opportunity to run raucously riot. But the results, under Jordan's guidance, are sadly more Velveteen Slagheap than Velvet Goldmine: many of the period details are just plain wrong (a clangingly incongruous Beck's lager sign above a pub; the platform numbers at a major London railway station); there's a fuzziness about chronology which means we're never entirely sure precisely when things are taking place. If Jordan's script was up to scratch, of course, the audience's attention wouldn't snag on such peripherals - but the screenplay is a gimmicky confection of camp, sentimentalised whimsy. And it doesn't help that every couple of minutes we get a chapter number and "amusing" title appearing on screen in a childish hand - those numbers reaching well into the thirties by the time this inordinately long picture finally clanks to a halt. Murphy is an unusual, intriguing presence, but Kitten as a character is too floatily insubstantial - he's constantly being told that he's "out of his league", "in over his head," etc - and superficial to really snare and engage our attentions or our sympathies. As if aware of this fact, Jordan amps up the supporting roles towards caricature wherever possible, with mostly clumsy results: Rea and Ferry fare much better, underplaying their roles as (respectively) a has-been end-of-the-pier magician and 'Mr Silky String', a seedy 'john' who picks up Kitten during his brief stint as a "lady" of the night. Not that Jordan dwells on the latter aspect of the story: indeed, Breakfast on Pluto is a conspicuously chaste affair, with Kitten habitually resisting physical intimacy despite generally wallowing in ostentatious sensuality. A charitable viewer might seek to excuse Breakfast on Pluto's many deficiencies by suggesting that Jordan wants us to see the film as though it's being refracted through Kitten's own immature sensibilities - but surely Kitten would have served up a rather camper kind of extravaganza, with himself as the heroine of a hysterical, Douglas Sirk-ish melodrama in the Far From Heaven mode. And there'd be also rather more in the way of sex and less of the politics - the 'IRA stuff' being chucked into the mix for what feels like cheap significance and gravitas. As it is, the most reasonably charitable interpretation of the film would be to diagnose a severe mismatch between writer-director and material - but it would perhaps be more accurate to discern a mismatch between writer-director and form. It's been over a decade since the last of his three novels, and on the basis of this dog's Breakfast - which deserves as fleeting a prominence as the single after which it's named - he'd be well advised to give the camera a rest and give the pen another go. Neil Young 23rd December, 2005 BREAKFAST ON PLUTO : [3/10] : Ireland (Ire/UK) 2005 : Neil JORDAN : 129 mins (BBFC timing) seen at Odeon cinema, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (UK), 21st December 2005 - public show with thanks to Sheila Seacroft for the 'Velveteen Slagheap' |
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