Hollywood has covered the full range of stock Irish characters, with leprechauns, terrorists and now - with Road to Perdition and Gangs of New York - gangsters. But there have been some strange casting choices, writes Joe Queenan in New York
Several years ago, some clever critic whose name escapes me wrote that the only time in the history of Ireland that everyone agreed on anything was when word got out that Kevin Costner might land the starring role in Michael Collins.
Though I do not feel anything even vaguely resembling this sense of cultural outrage when the names Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks and Paul Newman come up, I must confess to a certain confusion as to why actors who do not look even vaguely Celtic are suddenly popping up in movies about Irish-Americans. After all, there are about 50 million of us over here in the US, more than 10 times the population of Ireland. Did somebody lose Sean Penn's phone number?
The films to which I am referring are Sam Mendes's stylish, absurd Road to Perdition and Martin Scorsese's long-awaited Gangs of New York. In the former, a film about feuding bootleggers that is set in the American mid-west during the Great Depression, Tom Hanks plays a thoroughly professional Irish- American hit man who has a falling-out with his mentor and surrogate father, played by Paul Newman. After Newman's son, also an Irish-American, murders Hanks's wife and oldest boy, Hanks takes his remaining boy, aged 12, on an interesting road trip, teaching him the meaning of being a man while roaming around the mid-west knocking over crooked banks that are secretly hoarding the filthy lucre of arch-criminal Al Capone.
Ultimately, the boy decides that even though his father obviously has some serious moral shortcomings, he is a great guy to hang out with.
In Gangs of New York, which will be released in the US on Christmas Day, DiCaprio, who does not look Irish, plays a feisty Irish immigrant who leads an insurgency against entrenched "nativist" forces led by Daniel Day-Lewis. Day-Lewis, ironically, does look Irish, and has played Irish characters in the past in My Left Foot, The Boxer, The Last of the McHicans (only joking).
Because the troubled, rumour-plagued Gangs of New York is still being edited down to a manageable size, and is in the process of having a new score written for it, we have no idea where it fits into the Scorsese canon. We only know this: Daniel Day-Lewis is a lot more convincing as a person of Irish ancestry than Leonardo DiCaprio. For that matter, so is Robert De Niro.
This curious casting conjures up memories of bygone times when bloodthirsty Comanche and Kiowa warriors were invariably played by paunchy Jewish and Italian character actors, or when omnipotent Persian sultans were played by pasty-faced British schoolboys. It is almost as if Hollywood is making up for years of casting Laurence Olivier as the second coming of Mohammed (in Khartoum), or John Wayne as Genghis Khan (in The Conqueror), or Frank Sinatra as Spain's most emaciated partisan in The Pride and the Passion, by forcing Irish-Americans to take their licks.
Mind you, there is no law that says that actors can only play characters from their own ethnic groups. Marlon Brando, the most famous on-screen Sicilian of them all, is not of Italian heritage; Anthony Quinn is not Greek; Gwyneth Paltrow is not English; Joaquin Phoenix is not Roman; Anthony Hopkins does not hail from Picasso's Barcelona.
But a conspicuous failure to pay heed to ethno-cultural verisimilitude can often lead to misfortune: Jeanne Tripplehorn was spectacularly unconvincing as a Mafia scioness in Mickey Blue Eyes, and Michael Caine was perhaps the least persuasive Nazi stormtrooper in The Eagle Has Landed. Nor was Rod Steiger especially credible in the role of Napoleon Bonaparte in Waterloo. And how the hell did Tony Curtis wind up in Taras Bulba? Because the rise of the Irish in America coincided so neatly with the rise of the motion picture industry, Irish-Americans have always been linchpins of the art form - i.e., there are a lot of us, and we like seeing ourselves up on the silver screen.
But the vast majority of films starring James Cagney, Tyrone Power, Pat O'Brien and other members of the post-leprechaun Irish-American subculture are not about the Irish per se. The actors merely happened to be Irish-Americans playing charismatic characters in movies. They had already been assimilated into the mythical American melting pot.
Moreover, the Irish have been mercifully spared the ceaseless ethnic stereotyping that has afflicted Italian-Americans and African-Americans. Many Italian-Americans loathe films such as Goodfellas and The Godfather, and are deeply disturbed by the negative cachet attached to Italian-American gangsters in The Sopranos. It doesn't help that Italian-Americans are the ones who keep making these films. And affluent black Americans - a group the media studiously refuses to deal with - have had it up to here with cretinous films about boyz in the hood. If the boyz want to stay in the hood, let them. Anyone with half a brain is moving to the suburbs.
In the golden age of Hollywood, Irish-Americans got off a lot better than most other ethnic groups. In films such as Going My Way and The Bells of St Mary, the radiantly Celtic Bing Crosby scattered his fairy dust around the sidewalks of New York, and everyone thought that was just swell. The Irish in America were also portrayed as possessing a kind of proletarian nobility in films as varied as In Old Chicago, Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, where the reliable sergeants were always played by the likes of Ward Bond and Victor McLaglen. Even in Angels with Dirty Faces, where Cagney and O'Brien played ruffians whose career paths take hugely divergent turns - one becomes a criminal, the other a priest - the Irish came off looking pretty good.
But in recent times, my ethnic group has taken a definite turn for the worse on the silver screen. Ed Harris and Gary Oldman were chilling psychopaths in State of Grace, which starred Sean Penn as an undercover cop forced to infiltrate the gang that has terrorised his Hell's Kitchen neighbourhood from time immemorial, but is now ceding power to the Italians. Indeed, everything about State of Grace, an underrated film, illuminates what is wrong with Road to Perdition, an overrated one. What Harris brings to the screen in Phil Joanou's 1990 film is the mixture of charm and cruelty that typifies Irish-American males. Hanks, who does not seem to have a nasty bone in his body, simply cannot convey the ability of the clannish, vindictive Irish-American male to turn on a dime and transform one's closest friend into one's worst enemy. When Hanks goes back to seek a reckoning with Newman (who is equally unconvincing as an Irish gangster) at the end of the film, he is almost contrite. Harris would have blown Newman's brains out first, then had the chit-chat. Ditto Gary Oldman. Ditto Sean Penn.
The other developing theme in recent films centring on Irish-Americans is the kind of revolting paddywhackery that the Irish themselves find so infuriating. Several years ago, I wrote an article called "Blarney Stoned" for Movieline in which I attempted to determine which was the most absurdly stereotypical Hibernian film in the history of cinema.
BASICALLY, there were two kinds of motion pictures in this genre: those centring on the IRA, and those focusing on the wee, canny, lovable Irish people who always had a bounce in their step and a song in their hearts. The first group included everything from The Informer to Odd Man Out to Cal to Michael Collins. The second group included The Field, The Legend of Roan Inish, The Quiet Man, Far and Away, and even The Commitments. By and large, the IRA films tend to be engrossing if predictable, while the second group tend to be sappy and even more predictable films in which the pipes, the pipes never stop calling from glen to glen, making anyone of Irish or Irish-American ancestry desperate to get the next plane out of Carrickfergus leaving for Santa Monica. My father never forgave Fred Astaire for his turn as a leprechaun marooned in the deep south in Francis Ford Coppola's whimsical, awful Finian's Rainbow. Neither have I.
Still, as I pointed out at the time, the most ludicrous Irish film of them all was The Brothers McMullen, set in Queens. Massively hyped at the time because it was allegedly made for about $30,000, Ed Burns's directorial début was the kind of self-involved indie flick in which the Irish-American protagonists could not brush their teeth or start their car without first wolfing down a keg of Guinness and putting on a Notre Dame Fighting Irish sweatshirt. In this type of movie, ethnicity is a kind of fetish involving beverages, sports, clothing, Catholicism. And nothing more.
Ironically, misguided paddywhackery is the subtext of Alan J. Pakula's 1998 film, The Devil's Own. Here, Brad Pitt, not to be confused with Gerry Adams, played a dedicated IRA operative who has come to New York to buy an arsenal of weapons to be used against British troops. Another underrated motion picture, The Devil's Own drives home the point that while Stateside Celtic Pride largely consists of listening to The Chieftains and visiting saloons, being in the IRA is real. Brutally contrasting affluent Irish-Americans, who think terrorism is a sort of lark, with real Irish terrorists - in this case, one whose father was gunned down before his very eyes by Protestant gunmen - The Devil's Own is one of the few movies to get things right. That is, war is not a pastime. The chasm that exists between the Irish and Irish-Americans is vast; we have all the money, we have all the power, we have all the really good civil-service jobs, we buy all the Clannad records. In Belfast, things are somewhat different.
Which brings us back to Gangs of New York. When I first saw the trailer for Scorsese's troubled, overdue, hugely expensive epic about the hatred directed toward immigrants in 19th-century New York, I couldn't help guffawing at the casting of Leonardo DiCaprio as an Irish navvy. But then I recalled the remarkable Italian film, Francesco, in which Mickey Rourke plays St Francis of Assisi. Maybe Scorsese is simply trying to even the score.
Road to Perdition is released on Friday, and Gangs of New York in January 2003.