From the labyrinth of terror and bloodshed it re-creates on screen, Neil Jordan’s stunning historical epic “Michael Collins” raises up a cry of lamentation and pride, a scream so fierce the movie almost seems to shake with its strangled sorrow and dark rage.
This wildly ambitious picture, which portrays the six furious last years of Ireland’s most famous revolutionary leader in its bloodiest era, unfolds like a nightmare from which we can’t escape, ending in ashes. It’s a tale of classic pity and romantic terror — about a guerrilla war genius turned diplomat and martyr, a hero who swims in violence and drowns in its torrent.
“Michael Collins” — which won this year’s Venice Film Festival Grand Prize and an actors prize for Liam Neeson (who is at his best playing Collins) — is a shockingly brilliant picture, the kind of film that reminds us just how much movies can accomplish; how they can sweep us away, blast against our eyes and heart. Even against such formidable opposition as the two big Cannes Festival winners, “Secrets and Lies” and “Breaking the Waves,” Jordan’s epic may well be the movie of the year.
But where “Secrets and Lies” offers reconciliation and peace, “Michael Collins” is a child of doom. With its masked-but-boiling emotions, its gray, war-torn Dublin vistas, its cold, clipped dialogues of desperate men, “Collins” convincingly paints a world of total paranoia, where murder is an everyday occurrence. And it convincingly places at the center a hero, Neeson’s Collins, who adjusts to the slaughter before succumbing to its fury.
Jordan sets the movie between the years 1916 and 1922, when Collins, who was only 31 when he was killed, made his fame. As Neeson plays him, Collins — a self-proclaimed “Yob from Cork,” whom the pressbook says was the model for guerrillas as diverse as China’s Mao Tse-tung and Israel’s Yitzhak Shamir — seems exactly the lusty figure whom his contemporaries always called “The Big Fella,” riding or striding like a flawed colossus through Dublin’s post-World War I battleground.
When we first see Collins, he is part of a defeated band of Easter Rebellion fighters, pulled from the smoking ramparts of a besieged Brit-ish post office in Dublin, along with his best friend, Harry Boland (Aidan Quinn), and his compatriot and one-time mentor, the American-born Eamon De Valera (Alan Rickman).
These three survivors, like future lords and warriors in a Shakespearean play scene, will later rise and clash furiously. The “Big Fella” will engage the British ferociously — earning the respect, apparently, of both Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George — and then take a sharp turn toward peace when De Valera names him head negotiator for the truce.
Harry and “Dev,” meanwhile, will become his rivals; Harry for the love and bed of Kitty Kiernan (Julia Roberts) and Dev for Ireland itself. (De Valera would become the country’s first and longtime president.)
The movie has a number of other key characters — including Jordan stalwart Stephen Rea (the surprised IRA guy in “The Crying Game”) as Ned Broy, the spy in the British police station; Ian Hart (the movies’ now-typecast John Lennon) as Collins’ right-hand man Joe O’Reilly; Charles Dance as Britisher Soames, head of the feared Cairo gang, secret branch of the Black and Tans.
But Jordan’s decision to concentrate, almost obsessively, on Collins, Harry and Dev — and, to a slightly lesser extent, Kitty — gives his vast war story an intimate core. As with Greek tragedy, the slightest tremors in these tightly knit relationships make a nation shake.
Neil Jordan (“The Crying Game,” “Mona Lisa”) is Ireland’s greatest living filmmaker. A lyrical writer and voluptuous imagemaker who’s wandered the wilds of Hollywood and survived (“Interview with the Vampire”), Jordan has poetry and madness at his fingertips, and he gives the movie fantastic sweep and an almost surreal intensity.
Jordan first wrote the script and cast Liam Neeson back in 1982 after the two met on John Boorman’s “Excalibur” (where Jordan was an adviser and Neeson played Sir Gawain). The project has been his artistic obsession ever since, the script revised many times.
Now, given temporary power by “Vampire’s” success, Jordan has realized a dream project with a dream company, which includes production designer Anthony Pratt (another “Excalibur” veteran) and Britain’s finest cinematographer, Chris Menges, who returns to the camera after nine years. Menges — who worked for years with Ken Loach on gems like “Kes” — is a master of realistic lighting. But instead he’s given Jordan a mixture of realism and visionary terror.
The movie achieves this dreamlike horror even though the script sticks fairly closely to historical record. The main Irish characters are all real — except Broy, who’s a composite of three people — and most of the events, including the seemingly improbable Collins-Kitty-Boland love triangle, happened. But as we watch, “Michael Collins” becomes less historical film than history as nightmare.
Liam Neeson was 29 and no Hollywood star when Jordan cast him as Collins — but this is, and will probably remain, the role of his career. Neeson, great as he was in “Schindler’s List,” was slightly miscast there. But he’s perfect as Collins: charismatic, tormented, divided, the kind of man his rivals might well feel compelled to kill.
The world of “Michael Collins” — caught by Menges in steely shades of gray and blue — always seems fearsomely circumscribed. But the movie is terrific at conveying the brief, heady exhilaration of living in chaos.
“Michael Collins” is the sort of movie the David Lean of “Lawrence of Arabia” might have made, if he had been not an ironical master moviemaker in his 50s, but instead was a younger man, his heart full of battle and poetry.
There are advantages to Lean’s artistic distance and perspective. But there also are strengths in Jordan’s overheated poetry, his love of this fallen hero and flawed giant. “Michael Collins” may not be the supreme Irish epic of the “Troubles” that it wants to be, but, like the Big Fella himself, it towers above its more unambitious movie rivals.
”MICHAEL COLLINS”
(star) (star) (star) (star)
Directed and written by Neil Jordan; photographed by Chris Menges; edited by J. Patrick Duffner, Tony Lawson; production designed by Anthony Pratt; music by Elliot Goldenthal; produced by Stephen Woolley. A Warner Brothers release; opens Friday. Running time: 2:12. MPAA rating: R. Language, sensuality, nudity, violence.
THE CAST
Michael Collins …………………….. Liam Neeson
Harry Boland ……………………….. Aidan Quinn
Ned Broy …………………………… Stephen Rea
Eamon De Valera …………………….. Alan Rickman
Kitty Kiernan ………………………. Julia Roberts
