Butcher Boy & Les Miserables
Alleva, Richard
et me do Neil Jordan's interesting new movie The Butcher Boy a terrible injustice by telling you what's in it. Drunkenness. Suicide. Vandalization of a house by defecation. Madness....
...Nothing else does...
...A near-suicide by immolation...
...The key to playing Valjean is to suggest fathomless goodness within invincible animality, as if the soul of Francis of Assisi had transmigrated into the body of a Kodiak bear...
...It is Neil Jordan's triumph that, though we never lose sight of what is really happening to the boy, we are caught up in the vaudeville that our hero has made of his life...
...Jordan has brought off this stunt through the following devices...
...Although I sense that August didn't have the funds necessary for all the spectacle he had in mind, the costumes are magnificent...
...Yet the writing doesn't completely lack subtlety...
...His work here ranges from the cut-rate (the sewer escape needs more murk and more labyrinthine perilousness) to the first-rate (Javert's suicide truly shocks, and if I hadn't been familiar with the story, would have caught me off guard...
...The delinquents whom Francie meets in reform school are just ordinary farmboys who've run afoul of the law...
...We live within his insanity without being deluded by it...
...With its self-conscious gravity, the moment is typical of The Herbal Bed, a thoughtful but entirely humorless work that guttered briefly on Broadway this spring, before indifference snuffed it out...
...But for Francie, who dreams about the happy home and personal dignity he's never enjoyed, it is a monumental catastrophe...
...For we watch "The Francie Brady Show," too...
...The parallels McCabe and Jordan try to draw between the boy's growing insanity and the madness of the cold war (the movie climaxes during the Cuban missile crisis) seem forced to me, because what torments Francie---parental irresponsibility, the malice and snoopiness of neighbors, poverty's subversion of dignity--would have tormented him in the nineteenth Commonweal | 7 June 5,1998 century or earlier...
...In fact, in one scene a mother superior's headgear almost upstages Liam Neeson...
...ife is unfair, especially at the movies...
...But "one and only"is not quite accurate...
...So just flip the page to the next article and join me in two weeks...
...How closely does any society hold its faith...
...The supporting cast (including author McCabe as the town drunk) is uniformly apt but, though Jordan gets some nice moments from Eamon Owens as Francie, this novice actor can't deliver all the shadings the character needs to engage us completely...
...Letting the Bard lurk behind the scenes, a ghostly, invisible presence, Whelan fleshes out this anecdote to ask a solemn question: Does duty to one's conscience outweigh a duty to others...
...And who can blame her...
...The slaughter of animals...
...As his policeman-nemesis, Geoffrey Rush is an electric current skimpily fleshed, the perfect foil for Neeson's brawny humanity...
...Not all of the movie works so well...
...There...
...That is why the movie, like the Patrick McCabe novel it faithfully adapts, makes us laugh...
...And when she looks up at the building's soaring heights, she thinks she sees God the Judge...
...But it doesn't matter...
...The director has revved the boy up for every scene and, in a film as hectic as this one, the childish shouting grows tiresome...
...A corpse rotting in a parlor...
...Guilty in intent but not in fact, the spirited Susanna (Laila Robins) struggles to Commonweal | 8 June 5, 1998...
...She is about to commit perjury in diocesan court...
...That movie biography needed a master of spectacle like David Lean at its helm...
...But when our hero labels them "The Bog Boys," they turn into strolling players capering in unison...
...Worst of all is Jordan's failure to dramatize the destruction of Francie's most cherished dream: the blissful honeymoon his parents supposedly enjoyed at a seaside hotel...
...Inferior in artistry to The B u tcher Boy, Les Misdra bles nevertheless grips just as hard...
...How much better than Cedric Hardwicke's desiccated rectitude in the 1935 version...
...It seems that if a director can get Hugo's big set pieces right (the bishop's candlesticks, the overnight rescue of Cosette, the death agony of Fantine, the escape through the sewers, the final confrontation of Valjean and Javert), whatever is done to the connective tissue in between tends to fade from memory...
...And he's evoked from his cast near-farcical performances which turn the characters into members of Francie's comedy troupe...
...No matter what happens to the boy--the tragic loss of both parents, physical assaults on him and by him, hallucinations, sexual molestation, confinements in reform school, asylum, and prison--'The Francie Brady Show" never receives anything less than great reviews and fantastic ratings from its one and only audience: Francie Brady himself...
...They include fantasies fed by TV shows and comic books, bravura lies, fits of violence, idealization of his only friend (a level-headed boy whose very level-headedness finally estranges him from Francie), and a vendetta against that denouncing neighbor whose own son enjoys all the advantages Francie has always been denied...
...Brawling...
...Twelve-year-old Francie Brady hears a neighbor woman denounce publidy his drunken father and mentally fragile mother...
...And...oh yes, a vision of the Virgin Mary (portrayed, so help me, by Sinead O'Connor...
...Otherwise, The Butcher Boy succeeds as a piteous comedy of horrors...
...Bille August has never been the most limber of directors even at his best (Pelle the Conqueror...
...Now let me confess to those of you who have inexplicably continued reading that as I watched The Butcher Boy I couldn't stop laughing...
...Hallucination...
...A child charred from head to toe...
...For any boy living in a small Irish town in the early '60s where everybody knows everybody else, this would be bad enough...
...But, just as McCabe's novel permits us to detect realities that Francie's addled mind can't deal with, Jordan's direction allows his actors a moderate degree of realism so they don't all come across as mere puppets of Francie's dementia...
...who here uses the f-word and winks seductively at the boy who's dreaming of her...
...Therefore, the girl's rebellious love for Marius the revolutionary seems psychologically inevitable...
...Out of the wrong side of the mouth, through tears, with a sick sensation at the pit of the belly, but laugh we do...
...So the boy's defenses go up...
...The play asks us to view the incident as a tinge of historical color: It is the summer of 1613, when Shakespeare was dying, when cathedrals were skyscrapers, and people were not embarrassed to talk about God...
...Occasionally though, Jordan's staging does completely surrender to Francie's twisted perceptions, and it is precisely then that the movie becomes most like music hall...
...Similarly, the gossipy ladies in a grocery store are just that, but they are also a comic chorus galvanized into eyerolling and lip-smacking by the boy's boasts and lies...
...Rafael Yglesias's script is a Reader's Digest Abridged Books skim-job that soon turns into Evelyn Wood speedreading...
...Of course not...
...He's kept the camera's perspective shallow, so that the action is as "in-our-face" as any TV sitcom...
...The Herbal Bed--like another recent Broadway o f f e r i n g , David Henry Hwang's Golden Child--uses religious belief as a measuring rod to gauge its characters' alienation from the culture that surrounds them...
...The Herbal Bed, which had a successful run in England before its luckless journey westward, is based on a historical event: a lawsuit brought, and won, by Susanna Shakespeare Hall against an acquaintance who had publicly accused her of adultery...
...something of a sexual puritan and, consequently, a rather stifling father to Cosette...
...The Butcher Boy is about what human consciousness does when it is in constant peril of humiliation...
...You don't want to see this catalogue of horrors, do you...
...Depth-of-focus might have given this movie a clarity and objectivity that would have rendered its horrible events unbearable...
...It marks a return to form for Neil Jordan after the conventional bustle and posturing of Michael Collins...
...The current version of Les Misdrables is nowhere near as inventive an adaptation as The Butcher Boy, nor does it cram as much of Hugo's novel within its two-and-a-quarter hour running time as the 1935 Hollywood entry (which was twenty-five minutes shorter...
...Whether lifting the cart off the crushed worker (and Neeson is the only star actor around, aside from Arnold Schwarzenegger, who looks physically capable of that feat) or tenderly watching his adopted daughter brush her hair, this Irish actor has captured Hugo's saintly brute to perfection...
...But, most of all, Young Brady defends himself by creating within his own skull a sort of ongoing vaudeville show of which he is the host and indefatigably spieling star...
...Jordan is something else: a bad boy with a heart, a purveyor of shock who can also tug at heartstrings...
...Claire Danes pleases as Cosette, and Uma Thurman has a good time, as all beautiful actresses do, making herself look tubercular and ugly...
...How high is Worcester Cathedral...
...The slaughter and dismemberment of a woman...
...Child abuse...
...And the audience about me (a full house) was laughing harder than I. How can this be...
...And the offscreen voice of the adult Francie who narrates the movie quizzes and heckles the on-screen juvenile Francie like a comic badgering his "straight man...
...A lyrical dream sequence was called for to show how much this fantasy mattered but, surprisingly, the director treats it perfunctorily...
...But the real hero of this film is neither Yglesias nor August nor the costume designer nor even Neeson or Rush...
...For instance, Yglesias manages to s u g g e s t t h a t both Valjean's brutalization in prison and his spiritual reformation turned him into n The Herbal Bed, Peter WheI l a n ' s ponderous drama about morality and Shakespeare's daughter, a serving girl collapses from vertigo in Worcester Cathedral...
...The supporting cast is fine, especially Peter Vaughan, who makes the bishop's loving nature almost palpable...
...It's a layered effect: what Francie perceives and doesn't perceive are both visible to us...
...It is Hugo: poet, populist, and future powerhouse of the West End, Broadway and Hollywood...
Vol. 125 • June 1998 • No. 11
