Michael Collins Shine
Alleva, Richard
Richard Alleva HEROES & PRODIGIES 'Collins' & 'Shine' In Michael Collins, Irish revolutionaries fight the British forces everywhere: on the streets, inside public buildings, at police stations,...
...David Helfgott, the pianist-hero of Shine, isn't well known in this country, but in his native Australia he's apparently something of a phenomenon...
...Kitty is finally relegated to being a sounding board for Collins instead of a character in her own right...
...You've got to tame it...
...Also swift and sure is the depiction of the I.R.A.'s first attacks, with each short action sequence subtly accelerating the tempo of the previous one...
...Shine may not live up to its title, but its cast gives off more than a few glints...
...Pianistic ecstasy is supposed to be conveyed by the camera swooping about our hero as he whips up a Rachmaninoff storm...
...The result is never boring but never truly exciting...
...But the real masters of spectacle, from D. W. Griffith to David Lean, were artistically ruthless with their raw materials...
...The Easter uprising is presented with proper economy, for where would this movie go if its opening scene was also its most spectacular...
...But behind the camera all of the filmmakers seem to have been absorbed by the most imperialistic power of all-big-scale Hollywood moviemaking...
...It lacks a guiding, idiosyncratic consciousness...
...The former swashbuckling guerrilla now became, for the sake of peace, a beleaguered member of the new establishment and was finally assassinated by some branch of the I.R.A...
...Richard Alleva HEROES & PRODIGIES 'Collins' & 'Shine' In Michael Collins, Irish revolutionaries fight the British forces everywhere: on the streets, inside public buildings, at police stations, in the very domiciles of the enemy...
...This is a true revelation and could partially explain why Collins was so willing to compromise at the bargaining table...
...re than a few glints...
...loving and marrying the attractive, supportive Gillian gave him the strength for an acclaimed comeback...
...Result: predictable long shots of fleeing crowds and exploding buildings, along with equally predictable cut-ins to anguished faces, corpses, etc...
...But in this movie Collins is just a roaring boy, leaping from battle into oratory and back again, taking time off only for the most conventional of love trysts...
...The last charge of Lawrence of Arabia's army is impressive in David Lean's epic, but even better is the close-up of a canteen banging against a saddle bow as the charge accelerates...
...There could be only one strong male Helfgott...
...Obviously, this is a spectacle of crowds, bombardment, oratory, murder, and ignorant armies clashing by day and night...
...Not content to display massive sets and crowds, they evoked excitement by selection and emphasis...
...the Machiavellian statesman, the Big Fella vs...
...But sometimes the best way to serve your native land is to explore your own obsessions, for your demons may be your country's demons...
...Collins was the revolutionary who, after the destruction of the older insurrectionists in the wake of the 1916 uprising, led the terroristic campaign that forced the British to the bargaining table in 1921-22...
...As the adult David, the Australian stage star Geoffrey Rush, a James Woods etherealized, captures the blend of sweetness and torment in the pianist's nature...
...Noah Taylor has an even harder task in playing the adolescent David, since he must suggest that same sweetness and torment behind a listless exterior...
...the fox, the bluff warrior vs...
...After more than a decade of nonper-formance, David inched his way back into music...
...Collins and De Valera become an archetypal pair of antagonists: the lion vs...
...Such visual and verbal cliches render this inherently powerful story silly or, at leasts soap opera-ish...
...But, since Collins was one of the negotiators who settled for Ireland's division and the continuance of the oath of allegiance to the crown, he found himself at odds with President Eamon De Valera and many others who wanted a united, independent Irish republic rather than home rule within the British Empire...
...Yet Shine isn't dismissible, for its actors fill out their roles with the conviction this movie needs...
...Who ever thought that Julia Roberts would end up playing Horatio...
...Michael Collins is big and bold and public and noisy, but Jordan's earlier film, The Crying Game, in its fantastic melodrama and sexual perversity, conveyed a lot more of the pain of Ireland...
...The equivalent of the young pug pulverizing the bag in a boxing movie...
...Because he "wanted someone else to bring back the bad news" while he himself would fight on for a completely independent republic, De Valera may have set the machinery in motion that led to his comrade's death...
...Helfgott's breakdown actually made him more communicative...
...Watching Michael Collins made me feel that logistics were in the saddle and riding the director, Neil Jordan...
...Two factors are at work here: First, the current approach to movie spectacle goes something like this: Now that we've spent all this money on extras, historic reconstruction, and firepower, let's show the public as clearly as possible what we bought...
...And Alan Rick-man makes a great, foxy De Valera: secretive and sly, dainty and infinitely dangerous...
...Then, when his pupil breaks one of his instrument's strings during practice: "Ah, now we're getting somewhere...
...Taylor proves a master-minimalist...
...But the writing of intimate scenes is as banal as the staging of the street battles...
...Second, it's clear that Jordan wanted his movie to be a thinking-person's epic with characterizations at least as memorable as the spectacle...
...When the younger Helfgott rebelled, Peter pronounced him dead, and David's subsequent mental collapse after a triumphant concert may have been an unconscious submission to his father's wrath...
...Scriptwriter Jan Sardi and director Scott Hicks deliver all the inevitable moments in the most predictable ways: firelight reflected in old Helfgott's eyeglasses manifests his torment...
...The subject matter is skimmed, never probed...
...However, the last half-hour of Collins begins to grip because Jordan takes a risk in his depiction of the De Valera-Collins relationship, daring to suggest that the future president set up his comrade by sending Collins to negotiate with the British...
...And at first the director seems to know how to handle his budget...
...After David's comeback, the old man acknowledged his son's accomplishment, then prepared himself for death...
...As an Australian instructor, Nicholas Bell conveys that special quality of a big fish in a small pond who wants his students to escape from the pond...
...We may or may not recall the Babylonian infantry being slaughtered by the Persian invaders in Intolerance, but we never forget the way the dying Mountain Girl is suddenly transformed by a cinematographic trick into a mosaic commemorating her sacrifice...
...But Armin Mueller-Stahl, as the father, dominates this film as indefatiga-bly as Peter dominates his family...
...Peter's banishment of his son is carried out by burning the scrapbook filled with David's press clippings...
...David's Royal College instructor warns him that "the piano is a monster...
...But the insight is only slipped in, and rather late in the movie at that, and is never made part of the movie's true substance...
...The crux of the movie is the relationship between David and his father, Peter, a Polish Jew so spiritually harrowed and crimped by the Holocaust that he turned his home into a fortress...
...And, despite Liam Neeson's reliable magnetism and virility, the characterization of the hero is superficial...
...It is a hollow movie...
...This German actor gets everything: the survivor's guilt, the compulsive love that must consume, the raging of a plebeian Lear...
...Though fostering his son's gift, Peter wanted only a local success for the boy since international renown would break up the family enclave...
...I respect Neil Jordan's desire to portray some of his country's anguished history...
...For instance, the love triangle of Collins, his best friend Harry Boland, and Kitty Kierna, is as conventional as the Clark Gable-Spencer Tracy-Myrna Loy vehicles of the 1930s...
...Collins was an unpredictable compound of intellect and force, personal tenderness and political expedience...
...The supporting cast is fine, with standout performances of Helfgott's two teachers...
...And the onset of David's illness is shown by the youth thudding to the floor as if Mental Breakdown were a bruiser who tags his victims with solid rights to the jaw...
...Touches like these are mostly missing from the spectacle of Michael Collins, and without them the burning buildings remain burning sets, the dying victims remain dutiful extras...
...In one uncharacteristically quiet moment, he tells a friend that politics have released a violence in him that he now fears was always too much a part of his nature...
...The art world has its heroes and martyrs, too...
...A success as a child prodigy in the 1950s, he suffered a mental breakdown that derailed his career and turned him into the sort of person Oliver Sacks writes about: a manic babbler whose logical skips and leaps, wisecracks, speed-freak stutterings, and surreal wordplays compose a weirdly poetic discourse...
...For us to be truly fascinated by him, we would have to be exposed to the murkier corners of his nature...
...What a turbid, Oedipally fraught scenario, yet how easily, how slickly the movie goes down the viewer's mental gullet...
...I don't know how historically defensible this view is but, dramatically, it is the best thing in the movie...
...the Long Fella...
...David's grand old Royal College teacher is Sir John Gielgud, who is grand and old and royal and, one desperately hopes, immortal...
...Yet, before Michael Collins is one hour old, we sense that it may or may not get faster, may or may not get noisier, but most certainly won't get any deeper...
Vol. 123 • November 1996 • No. 20
