Screen
Alleva, Richard
SCREEN their mutual longings. After some old comrades-in-arms,...
...Forest the night watchman making his rounds never calls out the hour Whittacker, the sleepy Samson, perfectly captures both Jody's and "All's well" but only sings out the Dylan Thomas line, "Oh, innocence and his mischief...
...the blonde pincushion of macho I.R.A...
...Please return this form with your payment...
...But this time he's not bowling, only tossing a terly, is one of those fellows, whenever you talk ball up and down...
...we may be shocked...
...I'll comply for the most fulfilling the obligations love puts on him...
...moll, Fergus's desperate strategy to save Dil's life, his compulsion to tell her of his part in Jody's death, and the sheer haste and panic involved in any assassination plot all coalesce and result in Surprise #3, a denouement Because the plot of The Crying Game contains full of misery, joy, left-handed justice, and long-term frustraat least three big surprises, the distributors of tion...
...libbing with the contestants before asking them the silly quesIn one respect, The Crying Game has been a tad overrated...
...It's possible to recapitulate the plot without utterly defusing [ ] Individuals $60.00 [ ] Institutions $75.00 it...
...From Asia, Africa, North and sciously, on a quest...
...After some old comrades-in-arms, including a former girlfriend of Fergus, track down our hero, they threaten Dil in order to coerce the now disaffected young man THE OBLIGATIONS OF LOVE into collaborating on another assassination attempt...
...At this point, Jody seems like a noble spirit betrayed by his faithless lady...
...Every he's responsible for them, but he knows that they are the pris- member of this cast brings out the doubleness of his or her charoners of Neil Jordan Land where terrible things happen to good acter...
...The smile on his face is still good-natured with him, comes up with Something Really Smart...
...or weep with him, though a perfectly viable alternative would be to weep at him and laugh with him, for our hero, though of Subscribe Now...
...the film have requested reviewers to forbear from The Crying Game shows how a man saves his soul through spilling certain beans...
...He's created them, Jordan certainly knows how to pick and guide actors...
...In The Crying Game, shock takes us deep- Imagine a loving father, cursed with clairvoyance, watching er into character...
...Jody the Groucho would spend five or ten minutes interviewing and adinnocent victim has become Jody the presiding spirit of irony...
...After their first sexual encounter, Jody's spirit reappears, still smiling, still bowling...
...No acquainted with Dil, sees the silhouette of the girl against her greater forbearance hath any movie critic than to forgo discusbedroom's nightshade embracing the shadow of Dave, an idi- sion of the unique Jaye Davidson...
...The catastrophe throws Fergus out of in NYS call collect (914) 941-7687 Ireland and, so he thinks, out of the I.R.A...
...The characters exist to be shocked so that indirect answer...
...volunteer, Fergus, becomes one of the cap- Single volumes @ $12.95 each, + $3.00 postage...
...Part 1: An I.R.A...
...Not to get faux-profound on you, but one of the things I keep fumbling for in these columns is an understanding of what ex20: 26 February 1993 Commonweal...
...It is more than guilt or prison bars or the expanse of oceans that Sudden incisions into character, ineffabilities of atmosphere, keeps our hero and heroine from sexual consummation, and the final emergence of a vision of life: these can be experienced when the country-western chestnut, "Stand by Your Man," is only by watching the movie...
...er than a director...
...Let me attempt an Hitchcock movie...
...It's certainly a bitare some interesting characters in his films but, with a few ex- tersweet taste but so is that of a thousand-and-one bad movies...
...And it struck me that people like that just don't exist Jordan, a former (and future...
...It's the contestants who are fascinating...
...And they do it, of course, because unlike their ancestors in the age of Groucho, they have grown up with the Tube, and have come to assimilate these gestures and articulations as paradigms of selfhood...
...In 1993: The Messiah in History, Is There Room for Christ in Asia?, The Spectre of Mass Death, Resurrection or cumstances that leave us not knowing whether to laugh at him Reincarnation?, Migrants and Refugees, and Mass Media...
...heard on the soundtrack under the closing credits, the irony it The Crying Game has been called Hitchcockian, but that's conveys is sweet, poignant, malicious, and hilarious-all at once...
...Each issue focuses on a single theme of movie, Fergus completely achieves his honor but under cir- vital importance...
...Part 2: In England, ORBIS BOOKS, Dept CLM, Maryknoll, NY 10545-0308 Fergus looks up Dil and falls in love with her...
...All is well, apparently...
...Jody Name Address is indeed doomed but the way he dies is totally unexpected by City/State/ZIP him, by Fergus, by any of the other Irish volunteers, and, cer- MCVISA orders accepted Call 1-800-258-5838...
...Miranda Richardson takes Jude, isn't life a terrible thing, thank God...
...ter to writer-director Neil Jordan cannot be betrayed in print...
...They-I don't knowstructure...
...There the aftertaste this movie leaves in the brain...
...louts in the film's first Consider just one visual motif as an example of Jordan's lov- third, and believably turns her into an assertive brunette vamping irony: the spectral reappearances of Jody in Fergus's assassin in the last...
...his characters move through their destinies...
...A certain rhythmic tameness makes the first third a they didn't think of themselves as `being on TV...
...But right after Fergus's second attempt to make love to Dil, an encounter that blasts all further intimacies, Jody appears effery Paine, who's an editor of the Wilson Quarjust once more...
...dexterous, is rather conventional in terms of blocking and shot "They were so spontaneous," he said...
...Dil's mis'THE CRYING GAME' taken jealousy of the I.R.A...
...a woeful countenance, never loses his sense of the ridiculous...
...That's the way Neil Jordan seems to watch more about Dil...
...She responds but Surprise #2 prevents Fergus and Dil from consummating Commonweal 26 February 1993: 19 a finger to make sure each reaches the happiest of harbors for and which grows ever more sinister as Fergus keeps learning he knows it's useless...
...Jody's ghost, in spotless white sweater and plus fours, now appears bowling a cricket ball (arguing about sports MEDIA helped bond the young men during the soldier's captivity) and smiling the most guileless of smiles...
...at least, not little too much like all those other I.R.A...
...So Fergus must A NATION OF STANDUPS intervene to reverence the memory of his pal...
...Remember, when to say, "but I couldn't tell you everything about her...
...ceptions, characterization is never the raison d'etre of a What makes The Crying Game so special...
...His best visual work you compare the-call it the "aura" of the original "You Bet is in the creation of the bar where Dil and Fergus rendezvous Your Life" with that of the current reincarnation featuring Bill Cosby...
...that is, they adopt, quite naturally, the pose and the poise of professional TV "personalities"-the body language, the right facial cast, even the right crispness of speech...
...And, by the end of the of the world church...
...Hitchcock was a master manipulator who, at his But, once plot is told and theme is stated, how to describe best, constructed roller coasters for his audiences to ride...
...The first one occurs when Fergus, only briefly and let you discover this unique creature for yourself...
...tions...
...Not only do they know they're on TV, but in Paine formulation-they think of themselves as being on TV...
...tainly, by the audience...
...hostage plays and movies the way everyone does now...
...I was watching reruns of the old `You Bet Your "I know you'd like to wring my neck, Fergus," that smile seems Life' show," Jeff was saying...
...novelist, is still more of a writ- anymore...
...misleading...
...tors and, eventually, the assigned executioner of a black British soldier...
...As for Jaye Davidson as Dil...well, I'll just thoughts as the Irishman becomes more and more deeply in- say that Davidson is the latest wonder of the Western World volved with Dil...
...but also knowing, perhaps a bit apologetic, even a bit taunting...
...And what a love it part, but I want to point out that even if I spilled is that Fergus feels for Dil by the time this movie concludes: every single bean on view, the surprises that I think really mat- A most unfashionably platonic, painfully hedged-in sort of love...
...his children fulfill the destinies he's already foreseen...
...Same-o same-o on any other game show, any other talk show, even with the folks interviewed on the local news: we have become among other things, a nation of standups and sound-byters...
...RICHARD ALLEVA otic roughneck...
...And each surprise so destabilizes the protagonist, Fergus, that he must reorganize his life in order to go on with it...
...What keeps the movie from falling apart into three unrelated films (aside from the visual consistency The Theological Journal of the 90s and forward motion of Jordan's staging) is our constant ap- Now Available from Orbis Books prehension that no matter how often Fergus tries to avoid getting involved in further dangers, some other compulsion (to make amends to the dead, to show compassion to the living) wilt push Founded in 1965 and published six times a year, Concilium is a world-wide journal whose contributors embody a "who's him right back into them, In fact, Fergus is, if only half-con- who" of theological scholars...
...Always The plot falls into three sections with each part ending in a he looks on with love, joy, and sorrow, but never does he lift twist...
...He does so, by STARRING IN OUR OWN SCRIPTS winning Dil's love...
...He, or at least some part of him, is trying South America, and Europe, Concilium reflects the many facets to learn how to be an honorable man...
...His script is audacious but his execution, though "Wha," I said...
...that have appeared on Broadway or in movie art houses at least See what I mean...
...Never mind that, as a spontaneous wit, the only thing Cosby has in common with Groucho is that he likes cigars, too...
...Stephen Rea makes of Fergus both a potentially lethal people and worse things happen to terrible people and where street fighter and the most innocent of sad sacks...
...The Paine Theorem becomes obvious if once every lustrum in the last half-century...
...Each time Fergus reorganizes, his life completely changes, both exCONCILIUM ternally and internally...
...But the good-hearted Fergus cannot keep his heart from Please specify titlesgoing out to the equally bonhomous Jody, who, sure that he is doomed, makes Fergus promise to look up his girl, Dil...
Vol. 120 • February 1993 • No. 4
