THE GENERAL
Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D. Sony Pictures Classics Director: John Boorman Writer: John Boorman Cast: Jon Voight, Brendan Gleeson, Adrian Dunbar, Sean McGinley, Maria Doyle Kennedy, Angeline Ball
Whenever I see a movie like "The Godfather," brimming with bad guys and bustling with rackets, I think: "These fellas are making big bucks, but they're also taking big risks. They get executed by their own kind, shot up by the cops, and sent up the river for life without parole. If they manage to survive to the age of 70, what have their done with their millions of ill- gotten lucre? They don't travel, they don't eat out much, their houses are ordinary (though they may have thousand-dollar suits), their cars are affordable by ordinary Joes, and what's more they have to pay a good part of their earnings to bodyguards and alarm systems and police payoffs." Then I realize. These characters are not in it for the money but for the thrills, the discharge of power, the fun of thumbing their nose at society's rules, and most of all for the high they get for stepping back into the past and acting like tribal chieftans. So it was with Martin Cahill, the most infamous Irish criminal of the 1980s. Sit engrossed through John Boorman's new movie, "The General," and you get the impression that Cahill robbed, severely disciplined his band of punks, and lived happily with two "wives," to display his contempt, his disgust, his feral hatred of society's institutions. In Boorman's two hour and nine-minute work, filmed in black-and-white to cement the mythic, atavistic nature of the story, Cahill (Brendan Gleason) is nothing if not inflamed by the Dublin establishment: the Church, the police, the pols. He hates institutions so much that he has contempt even for the fellow Catholics in the IRA which he looks upon--for its radicalism-- as nothing less than another rigid organization. Never mind that he ran an association himself, a group of eight or ten cohorts whose passion is provoked more for the punts than the veneration. In splashing the story of this slippery individual--who relied on clever counselors and counterfeit alibis to avoid being on the run--Boorman instinctively conveys a portrait of a cross-section of Irish society which looked upon Cahill as a modern Robin Hood.
"The General"--which netted writer-director Boorman the well-earned best-director's prize at the '98 Cannes Festival before it took to rest of the film-festival circuit--begins with the title character's execution at the hands of a lone member of the IRA. A flashback takes us to Cahill's boyhood (played by "Butcher Boy" Eamon Owens) in a Dublin slum where he helps support his family by stealing food, in one instance a whole pig, to the cheers of his neighbors--who find time to pelt the pursuing police with assorted missiles. Apprehended and sent to a Church-run reformatory, he succeeds in fending off the sexual advances of a priest, and so appends the pious to his inventory of hateful institutions. When he is thrown out of his housing by well-meaning urban renewal people, though not after camping out in a desperate attempt to stop the demolition, he acquires a distaste for the government. Thumbing his nose even at the institution of marriage, he sets up a conjugal arrangement with Frances (Maria Doyle Kennedy) and Frances' younger sister Tina (Angeline Ball), whom he impregnates without acquiring a scintilla of Frances' covetousness. After a series of break-ins to acquire gifts of trains and the like for his family, me moves to the big time, he and his gang of amiable ruffians robbing O'Connors carefully-guarded jewelry outlet of millions in jewels and gold bars, then proceeding to carry away a Vermeer worth twenty million punts. ("I don't know much about art," he muses, "but I know what I like.") Though awash in capital, he continues to live frugally, getting his kicks from breaking into a home to threaten a woman about to testify against him in court.
If Boorman has a central focus it is with the series of confrontations between Cahill and a police inspector determined to bring him down, Ned Kenny (Jon Voight). With Kenny as Javert to Cahill's Jean Valjean, Boorman furthers the criminal's reputation by tallying his ability to bring the tight- lipped, socially-conscious policeman to Cahill's base level. While at an earlier time Kenny gives Cahill some avuncular advice about getting a respectable job and moving out of his "sewer" of a neigbhborhood, he ends by lashing out physically against the man he has grown to despise utterly and becomes tainted with the suspicion that he set Cahill up for an IRA hit.
While there is one spot of unequivocal violence in the picture, when Cahill virtually crucifies a member of his gang for allegedly stealing from the booty, Boorman fixes on Cahill the man. Not previously known for much depth of psychological insight (his best-known film "Deliverance," also featuring Jon Voight, stresses pure terror over cerebral depths), Boorman has succeeded splendidly in interpreting a criminal's disposition: Cahill's sense of humor which serves him well in evading a police surveillance team, and particularly his habit of covering his face with his hands when surrounded by photographers, who seem never to get a clear shot of him for their papers.
Brendan Gleeson, who plays the arch-criminal, is well- known in Ireland, less celebrated in the U.S. He is not the sort of actor that American studios would select for the role, preferring glitzier figures like Antonio Banderas, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. After all, Gleeson is short, plump and baldish, a fellow who can be designated "the Irish Gerard Depardieu," and perhaps because of this humanity is able to enlist our sympathies. Jon Voight, then, becomes the ideal choice for his nemesis, his antithesis: a bourgeois police officer intent on keeping his district neat, clean, orderly and yes, bland. "The General" is an original take on the crime genre, photographed in black and white and cleverly edited to underscore its title character's status as a legend in his time, a man who pays homage to his country's roots as a land governed not by impersonal, central forces but by the vigor of Celtic tribes.
Not Rated. Running time: 129 minutes. (C) Harvey Karten 1998
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