Ireland’s been an economic powerhouse for some years now. The Tiger’s Tail (Fri, 8 pm; SSS), written and directed by John Boorman, seems to be examining what Ireland has become and what it has lost, but then slips into a middle-ground between Boorman’s successes (Deliverance, The General) and failures (Exorcist II, Country of My Skull). An exploration of the isle’s identity crisis muddies into rough farce, sloppy drama, and flat social commentary.
 

Oedipus, Kafka, and those bloody Biblical brothers collide when, one night in a Dublin traffic jam, building developer Liam O’Leary (Brendan Gleeson) thinks he sees his double. Sinéad Cusack and the brooding, looming Gleeson do their best to hold together the centre, but things soon fall apart. Scenes bobble or flash by, and there are stagey flourishes. 
 

Boorman’s view of Dublin nightlife (puking, drugged-out, fighting twentysomethings) is shallow and overwrought—you can almost hear in voiceover: “tch! tch! you know, these kids today!” A mental hospital sequence gets locked up in madhouse-room clichés. An almost madcap comic pace battles with thundercloud-building drama (no system tries a man, hospitalizes, medicates and then releases him all in a day).
 

The social commentary can be earnest and bald, with the mythic overtones seemingly contrived to tumble O’Leary into the class gap on his arse. If Boorman would have found a different approach—more magic-realist, perhaps, with more elliptical, allegorical dialogue and a deepening sense of existential crisis—The Tiger’s Tail could have delivered on its promise. Instead, it ends up nearly as empty as the economic-success façade it’s trying to see beyond.

 

The program for Irish Film Shorts (Sun, 7 pm) includes “It’s Some Kind of Voodoo” (SSSS), a deliciously devilish bit of string-puppetry where a pathetic faux-artist has his vengeful impulse turned on him. With a nod to Tim Burton’s dark animation, Nicky Phelan’s short springs the bloody nice twist that, from even the most devilish of creations, some sort of hopeful life can wake. That sense of animating the stillborn is at the heart of one of Ireland’s most acclaimed writers, who’s offered a careful and contemplative study by an outstanding film. 
 

Pat Collins’s John McGahern: A Private World (Sat, 9 pm; SSSSS) offers the most truthful sense of fiction-writing I’ve ever seen on film. Writing is a private world, and here the acclaimed Irish story-writer and novelist, at his home in County Leitrim, lets us in by simply talking a little about his childhood, what he thinks good writing is (suggestion, not statement), why Ireland—with its “thousands of little republics” of families—makes for stronger poems and stories than novels, and then reading from his own work. The film measures a slowly ticking existence, camera following the pen in dramatizing those nearly inert, little moments that make up a life with images: a tractor in a field, a cow grazing by a tree next to a stone fence, a watering can by a greenhouse.
 

McGahern (who died in 2006, a year after this film was made) builds a stillness around the sentences as he reads, but he also believes that his delicate, observant prose is handed on to the reader to carry away. There’s a deep, tender thoughtfulness to this film (which skirts the of-its-day controversy around The Pornographer) that echoes McGahern’s wonderful prose. It’s prose that searches but can never explain the small strangenesses of life—especially his father, who “never felt he had to give any explanation for his actions.” But this is prose, like the supremely elegant film that showcases it, which hints at happiness, and that, as McGahern says in his hushed, considering lilt, “should be allowed its own slow pace, so that it happens unnoticed, if it ever comes at all.” V

Fri, Feb 29 - Sun, Mar 2

Irish Film Festival

Featuring Tiger’s Tail, Short Films, 

John McGahern: A Private World, others

Metro Cinema, $10 (opening night $15)

www.metrocinema.org

www.imdb.com/title/tt0490499/
 

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