AS the year of Michael Collins ends, we're still hearing about record- breaking Irish box office sales and a triumphant global procession. What our media have not been telling us is that in pubs, at Christmas parties, around family tables, Neil Jordan's film is the subject of vigorous debate.
It's not, for the most part, political: most of us, with our axes well ground or lost in the shed, can see that the film's implied comments on the North today are unobjectionable (except, perhaps, to some republicans), bordering on anodyne. Some of the arguments are historic: is the film's portrait of de Valera a piece of schoolboyish defacement? Would the Northern IRA units that Collins was still covertly arming at least until shortly before his death agree that he died trying to take the gun out of Irish politics?
But most cinema-goers care more about movies than about politics or history, and we're arguing - about whether Michael Collins is really all that good. Round our place we're not about to pluck it, stuff it and serve it for Christmas, but we have our doubts.
Some sections of Michael Collins were bound to be moving, and I really like: Stephen Rea as Ned "Don't call me boy" Broy; Ian Hart as Joe O'Reilly; Jordan's decision to focus in the film's first half on Collins's game - his efforts to break the Castle's intelligence apparatus. However, too much of the movie relies on flawed plot and characters resting on a complex - nay, contrived - structure of relationships that can't bear the weight.
The director of The Crying Game has made a film whose true "love interest" is Harry Boland (Aidan Quinn). The camera caresses every line in his face, plumbs his amazing eyes. Kitty Kiernan (Julia Roberts) looks flat by comparison; her best close-up is upside-down!
As most people admit, Roberts is pretty woeful, but the fault is Jordan's. Kitty is a foil, a cypher, only half a character, at best; basically she shares one, transsexual corner of this film's basic love triangle with Eamon de Valera (Alan Rickman) - again, remember The Crying Game. Kit and Dev love both Harry and Mick. Harry really wants Kit but gets Dev; Mick loses his Chief but gets Kit.
But, tragically, Harry and Mick particularly yearn for each other. "Harry, maybe we should settle down," says Collins near the start. "Ah, just the two of us?" smiles his bed partner, Boland. Later, Dev (recently dressed as a whore) literally lies between them, before he spirits Harry off to America - as Collins repeatedly laments that Dev "just wants to keep us apart".
In their last bedroom scene, rain streams down a window pane and Harry cries: "I want things to be the way they were before!" Mick turns the conversation from his engagement to Kit by reminding Boland of the consolation prize and his betrayal: "I hear you're Dev's right-hand man now.
There's nothing inherently wrong with this schema - but it runs so uneasily beside the film's more obvious plot (which must respect accuracy but defy narrative convention by killing off the love interest and the hero). It gives us nonsense like the deeply implausible dual-courtship of Kit; worse yet, Jordan ludicrously accommodates the death of Collins in terms of the triangle: behind a hayshed, a hysterical, heartbroken Dev cries out the names of Michael and Harry before sobbing away, leaving Mick to his fate.
SOME folks complain that Jordan has made a mere gangster movie. "Mere" grates with most film-lovers, who cherish such pictures, but there's no doubt the film invites the comparison: Collins jovially (anachronistically?) calls Boland a gangster, and Quinn even flashes his teeth a la Cagney. The flight of the cornered, wounded Boland (through Dublin's famed catacombs) also evokes the genre.
But Michael Collins suffers by the comparison. Take the most blatant allusion: the echoes in the Bloody Sunday sequence of the climactic baptism montage from The Godfather. Collins follows the lead of the other Michael, Corleone, reciting words of love, virtue and promise while his boys are out slaughtering his enemies.
Corleone's ritual renunciations of evil plunge us into the depths of obligation, hypocrisy and failed conscience; Collins's explication of his "valentines" is blandly heroic - with its vacuous blathering about the past versus the future, it could have been lifted from a Bill Clinton speech.
In this slack passage, the killings are more memorable than the intercut "justification" for them. (Just compare: however long ago you saw Coppola's film, you can probably picture Pacino's impassive face in that scene; now try to picture Neeson's.) It's not only because it marks the end of the interesting "spy v spy" segment that Bloody Sunday starts Michael Collins on a tedious meander to the closing credits - it's because in this scene Collins fails a simple test: do we get his motivation?
Many Irish viewers are clearly happy enough to fill in the gaps. Perhaps Jordan counted on Neeson's screen presence to do the same for other audiences. It worked in Schindler's List: a morally ambiguous character is turned into a comfortable film hero because of the moral energy and integrity that oozes from the star.
But it's a dodgy shorthand to rely on. Three or four decades ago, Hollywood's pride was a sequence of epic, historic, morally weighty movies that counted on "Charlton Heston as ..." in place of flesh-and-blood characters. Arguably it worked at the time; today heavily Oscared films like The Ten Commandments and even Ben Hur look faintly ridiculous, stodgily self-regarding.
Will Liam Neeson be remembered as the Charlton Heston of the 1990s?
