REVIEWED - TARA ROAD: Early on in Tara Road there's an odd scene where shady Dublin property developer Alan Devlin learns that his wife (Brenda Fricker) is on her way home and hides his secret lover (Bronagh Gallagher) in a cupboard. It seems to be setting the tone for a French farce or a surreal art film, but neither proves to be the case in what emerges as a sketchy, conventional melodrama.
The movie is structured as a series of mirror images as it follows the parallel lives of two women on opposite sides of the Atlantic as they struggle to cope with traumatic events. Marilyn (Andie McDowell), a New England music teacher, is grief-stricken after her only child is killed in an accident on his 15th birthday. In Dublin, on her daughter's birthday, Ria (Olivia Williams) is shocked when her husband (Iain Glen) admits to an affair with a younger woman who is pregnant as a result.
Over a transatlantic phone call, Marilyn and Ria, both welcoming a change of scene, impulsively agree to swap houses for the summer. In another couple of mirror images, a potential new love interest turns up for each of them, when Ria's close friend (Stephen Rea) meets Marilyn in Dublin and Marilyn's brother-in-law (Jean-Marc Barr) visits Ria in the US.
Tara Road is based on Maeve Binchy's novel, which sold over five million copies in the US. Its broad appeal cannot be explained by this adaptation - credited to Shane Connaughton and Cynthia Cidre - which, as edited here, leaps through the material, leaving gaps in the narrative and characterisation.
Not surprisingly, given the book's popularity in the US, it has the distinct whiff of a movie made for export, and it lacks the realistic grounding of the only earlier Binchy film, Circle of Friends (1995). Tara Road squanders all the talent it assembles on both sides of the camera under Gillies MacKinnon, the Scottish director who has made several movies in Ireland, and one of the outstanding British films of the 1990s, Regeneration.
The many peculiarities of his new film are as puzzling as that early scene of the hidden lover. Although Marilyn's husband is a teacher who has visited Dublin, he fears that an Irishwoman might put up religious pictures all over his house, wreck the furniture, or drink his expensive cognac. Meanwhile, a nosy Dub asks Marilyn to visit an old people's home because "they'd love to see an American".
Glen's Oirish accent is as dodgy as his character. Ria only learns how to use the internet when she moves to the US. Her friend (Maria Doyle Kennedy) brings a modern Dublin restaurant to silence when she sings a dirge. And the unfortunate Rea, as the restaurant owner, gets saddled with the movie's most grating dialogue when he declares: "Pike, it's a coarse fish, like myself."
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