Hey folks, Harry here with what promises to be another worthwhile Schumacher film as the once most maligned man of cinema continues his steps forward out of the darkness of mediocrity. Personally, I loved PHONE BOOTH this year... I thought it was sharp as a tack. Giving Joel an actress at Cate's calibre... well, she'll raise everyone's game. Here's a look at the film by someone very familiar with the case of Veronica Guerin in Dublin... Take a look...
Thought I'd drop you a line about Veronica Guerin, Joel Schumacher's new film starring Cate Blanchett. Veronica Guerin was a crime reporter with the Sunday Independent in the 1990's, and she continually took on Dublin's drug barons, exposing their underground dealings. She had her life threatened on a number of occasions before she was eventually murdered in 1996.
But before I start, a few caveats that double as background. Veronica Guerin may well be to Ireland what Princess Di and JFK are to Britain and America respectively everyone knows where they were when they heard she was dead. She wrote for the biggest selling Sunday newspaper in Ireland and week after week it seemed to be this plucky woman taking on the mad, bad criminals. Libel laws at the time meant that the criminals involved couldn't be named, so nicknames were created for them. Irish people became used to reading about the dealings of The Monk, Coach and The General (on whom John Boorman made a superb film starring Brendan Gleeson).
The problem with these nicknames was that it seemed to slightly lessen the impact of Guerin's stories, people who were distanced from Dublin, the centre of the crime, took them with a slight pinch of salt. But Guerin's murder was a jolting wake-up call to the country, a loss-of-innocence type moment that galvanised a country against the criminals. Her death provoked law changes that allowed the police, previously hamstrung by legal loopholes that allowed the criminals off the hook, to actually do some arresting and seizing of questionably attained assets.
And when the world premiere was staged in Dublin recently it bizarrely coincided with a Court of Appeals appearance by John Gilligan (portrayed brilliantly by Gerard McSorley in the film) who was acquitted of the murder of Guerin but jailed for 28 years for drug offences, partly thanks to Guerin's work. What I've gone a long way around saying here is that this is a difficult film for an Irish person to assess, given that we all lived through it a few short years ago.
So the film's flaws stick out. Like the fact that Gilligan is attributed with the murder of Martin 'The General' Cahill (in reality almost certainly carried out by the IRA, as in Boorman's film), the risible notion that one person is behind all the heroin trade in a city and the suggestion that Guerin helped do away with the drug trade in Dublin in reality other gangs just took over. But it would be churlish to dwell on these aspects, as any film that didn't make these simplifications would be almost impossible to watch. So, for example, the amalgamating of all the cops Guerin dealt with into one character, whilst jarring initially, does make sense.
The film has already been a huge success in Ireland, but Jerry Bruckheimer will be aiming at worldwide success, so the film becomes a sort of myth-making exercise, with the story slightly Hollywoodised to allow it travel better. Some of Guerin's work leaves the realm of journalism and she almost becomes a detective, one who makes odd leaps of faith that turn out to be right, mainly just because the film would otherwise lose its momentum.
But Blanchett is superb, managing to perfectly capture someone who was extraordinarily brave, but also given to a recklessness hard to understand. Where Michael Moore doorsteps people with cameras, Guerin doorstepped violent men and known killers, by herself and with no cameras to record what they did to her. The film falls down in making caricatures rather than characters out of those criminals, although McSorley is chilling as John Gilligan, a man with social climbing tendencies but given to horrific outbursts of violence.
The film packs an emotional, albeit hackneyed, ending that works well as a pay-off, but the film as a whole never grabs you by the shirt and shakes you. It tries to be a cross between the journalism expose-style of 'All the President's Men', and a portrait of a doomed, self-destructive protagonist, but ultimately the script is unable to reach those lofty goals.
By the by, the film has Colin Farrell in the most pointless cameo of the year (and there's stiff competition for that award, hello Charlie's Angels) and has Blanchett do a better Irish accent that Pierce Brosnan can manage. She seems to be turning into Meryl Streep, nailing accents and performances while being the best thing about slightly under-whelming films.
Hope I haven't gone on too long, but that's my two cents. If you use this call me
Johnny Clay
