Waking Ned (12) General release
How are things in Glocca Morra? American critics have been lapping up the nouveau Oirish yarn, Waking Ned Devine, with all the enthusiasm of green-faced, Tricolour-waving participants in New York's St Patrick's Day parade. And the movie has made five times more money at the American box-office than the combined US takings of The Butcher Boy, The General and Dancing at Lughnasa.
For reasons best known to the marketing department at 20th Century Fox, the film's title has been abbreviated to Waking Ned for release today in Britain and Ireland. Although set entirely in Ireland, the movie was filmed on location in the Isle of Man, attracted by that island's tax breaks. Written and directed by Kirk Jones, an award-winning English commercials director, Waking Ned aspires to the wit and whimsy of the classic Ealing comedies, but delivers only the hoariest of old stage-Irish cliches. It ladles on the blarney in its twee and slender tale of an Irish village, Tullymore, where so few people ever work that it must have the highest unemployment rate in the whole of the Emerald Isle.
Tullymore has a population of 52, one of whom wins over £6 million in the National Lottery. When crafty old codger Jackie O'Shea (played by Ian Bannen) reads this news in The Irish Times, he and his close friend, Michael O'Sullivan (David Kelly) seek out the winner's identity with a view to sharing in the spoils. Discovering that the winner is the eponymous Ned Devine, and that he died from the shock of learning that he won, the two friends set up a scheme where O'Sullivan will impersonate Devine to collect the winnings from "the man from Dublin", who, rather improbably, arrives in Tullymore by helicopter.
An even more threadbare subplot involves Maggie (Susan Lynch), a young single mother torn between two prospective husbands, one of them Finn (James Nesbitt), a pig farmer with a personal hygiene problem. "If it wasn't for the pigs, we'd be settled by now," laments Maggie.
The consequences involve the villagers consuming vast amounts of alcohol at all hours of the day and night and saying "mighty" a lot, as in "murder is a mighty word to use at this time of night", while David Kelly gets saddled with a gratuitous extended nude scene which is played for laughs, and Shaun Davey's score lays on the wistful uilleann pipes in the background. To be fair to David Kelly and Ian Bannen, they do what they can to elevate the movie, but they are defeated time after time by the banal screenplay. In the end, all that's missing in this wretched effort is for someone to invite Finn's pigs to come into the parlour and make themselves at home.
Michael DwyerBeloved (18) IFC
The current fad for distribution companies to use box office returns in the US as part of their marketing strategy on this side of the Atlantic has an inevitable downside when those figures turn out to be disastrous. Despite the omnipresence of its star, Oprah Winfrey, across the British and Irish media in recent weeks, Beloved arrives carrying an unmistakable whiff of failure, disdained by critics and ignored by audiences in America. No disrespect to the IFC, but the fact that a Jonathan Demme-directed film, based on one of the most acclaimed of modern American novels, should end up on a single screen there reinforces the message.
It would be wrong to give the impression that Beloved is some sort of catastrophic turkey; it's less interesting than that. Demme (with, one presumes, considerable input from Winfrey) has directed a stolid, rather dull film that never breaks free of its reverential approach to its material, and that fails to find cinematic language for the literary strategies with which the novel's original author, Toni Morrison explored memory, loss and the bitter legacy of slavery.
Set in 1870s Ohio, Beloved stars Winfrey as Sethe, a former escaped slave who is burdened by her memories of life on the plantation, and whose house is haunted by the spirits of her dead child. The arrival of a strange young woman, Beloved (Thandie Newton), precipitates Winfrey's decline and divides her from her only surviving daughter (Kimberly Elise).
The story revolves around Sethe, which is one of the film's major problems. Winfrey can act, certainly, but her performance is no more than competent, and most of the time she seems to be straining for a rather one-dimensional nobility. Newton has the thankless task of representing the ghostly Beloved, and her mannered performance, all rolling eyes and slurred words, quickly becomes grating.
For the most part, Demme keeps the story within the confines of the family home, with the exception of some uninspired flashbacks, illustrating the horrors of plantation life. In a couple of isolated sequences, this very long (almost three hours) film sparks to life - an extended flashback of the fugitive Sethe giving birth on a riverbank, for instance - but, after Philadelphia, this is another disappointing offering from a highly original director who seems to have lost his way since his acceptance into the studio mainstream.
Hugh Linehan
Arlington Road (15) General release
Mark Pellington's film opens with a startling opening sequence, shot in bleached-out monochrome, of a small boy running down the middle of a deserted suburban street, clasping his burnt and bleeding arm. The scene is set for a story of the worm in the apple of the American dream, but Pellington, unfortunately, never achieves the same shockingly surreal quality in the remainder of this competent but somewhat predictable thriller.
The boy is found by Jeff Bridges, a widowed father and academic, who takes him to hospital and becomes friendly with his family, led by clean-cut pop Tim Robbins and perky mom Joan Cusack. But things (of course) are not what they seem, and Bridges soon finds himself harbouring deep suspicions about his new pals.
Attempting to marry the conspiracy thriller with the suburban nightmare genre, Pellington falls uneasily between two stools - the dynamics of the thriller are too obvious, while the suburban surrealism sits uneasily with the whodunit plot.
The uneasiness is reinforced by the performances - Bridges is as watchable as ever, but his sympathetic naturalism is at odds with the cartoonishness of Cusack and Robbins, who seems to be reprising his overrated portrayal of another right-wing nasty in Bob Roberts. Within a few minutes, most viewers will have guessed what they're up to, helped along by some heavy hints embedded in the course Bridges is teaching on modern American extremism, while anyone unfortunate enough to have seen the cinema trailer for Arlington Road will be familiar with 90 per cent of the plot - an infuriating and increasingly common practice on the part of distributors.
Hugh Linehan
A Night at the Roxbury (15) General release
American TV stars Chris Kattan and Will Ferrell make their big-screen debuts, playing LA airheads whose obsession with getting into the right night-club never seems likely to be realised, in this flaccid, self-indulgent comedy which would have been a stretch as a five-minute television sketch, and is sheer torture as a feature-length film.
Hugh Linehan
