Film review by Kevin Patterson
WAKING NED DEVINE Rating: **1/2 (out of four) PG, 1998 Director/Screenplay: Kirk Jones Starring Cast: Ian Bannen, David Kelly, Fionnula Flanagan, Susan Lynch
WAKING NED DEVINE is the kind of film that you mostly enjoy while you're watching it, but there's nothing to leave much of an impression on the audience. If the projector had broken in the middle of this film, I would not have been particularly upset, and I don't know that I'd have come back for another showing to see the rest of it. It has a lot of little amusing moments, very little plot or character development, and absolutely no suspense or tension.
The premise: One morning in the small Irish village of Tullymore, Jackie O'Shea (Ian Bannen) tells his friend Michael O'Sullivan (David Kelly) that the newspaper reported that someone in their town has won the national lottery. There are only 53 people living in the village, so it doesn't take them too long to discover that the winner is one Ned Devine, who unfortunately died from the shock of discovering that he'd won. The two of them hatch a scheme to have Michael impersonate Ned Devine so that they can claim the money, and realize that they need to enlist the other villagers' help (and therefore share the money with them) in order to fool an investigator from the lottery commission. "And?" you may be asking. Well...that's about it, actually.
Writer/director Kirk Jones clearly sees the plot as nothing more than a reason to get the eccentric villagers interacting with each other. Now, normally I'm a sucker for movies that just let their characters talk and behave without insisting on a new plot twist every three minutes. But I guess I never really got the feeling that Jones really cared about his characters or even believed in them as real people: they're just there to spout mildly amusing lines. That's not to say that WAKING NED DEVINE isn't, in fact, amusing, which is good, because otherwise the characters would just seem kind of materialistic and shallow. Among the best comic scenes are the villagers' initial sly attempts to figure out who had the winning ticket, Jackie pretending he's won just to get his wife Annie (Fionnula Flanagan) to bring him his dinner, and Michael on a desperate cross-country naked motorcycle ride.
Unfortunately, Jones misses the best opportunities to create some sort of narrative hook (the lottery inspector catches them at Ned Devine's funeral, for example, but it's explained away in maybe two or three lines of dialogue). As a result, he tries to contrive other forms of tension, none of which are particularly successful. For example, a pig farmer named Finn (James Nesbitt) wants to marry Maggie (Susan Lynch), and she says she will if he agrees to give up pig farming. (True love right there, folks.) A crotchety old woman threatens to blow the whistle on them, but I never believed for a second that WAKING NED DEVINE would end with the entire village going to jail, and Jones gives her a particularly nasty, mean-spirited sendoff that seems way out of place in an otherwise light-hearted film.
A lot of movies suffer from trying to do too much, but WAKING NED DEVINE suffers from trying to do too little. Another reviewer called the film "effortless": he meant it as praise for the film's light tone, but I think it's true in a less positive way as well. Jones doesn't seem to have put much effort into constructing this story, and as a result his characters don't have to put much effort into making their way through it. The result is occasionally charming, but ultimately forgettable.
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