"When Brendan Met Trudy"
Brendan (Peter McDonald) is a Dublin high school teacher that loves music and movies, but hates teaching. When an extraordinary young woman named Trudy (Flora Montgomery) enters his life, he soon learns that there is more to living than Bogart and Brahms in "When Brendan Met Trudy."
The movie begins a la "Sunset Boulevard" with a body lying motionless in the gutter and a voice over explaining how he, Brendan, could arrive at such a nadir of life. As the story unfolds and more film references are mentioned and shown, we begin to understand that our hero is a tormented individual who is in desperate need of a change. His profession, teaching history and English at a Dublin high school, is unfulfilling, to say the least, and he seeks solace in his movies and his passion for song. This changes when Trudy enters the picture.
Trudy, Brendan learns, is a professional burglar and he, at first, is energized by the excitement of her crimes. Things are looking up for the teacher until he makes a big mistake and introduces his new girlfriend to his family, especially Nuala (Pauline McLynn), the sister from hell. Brendan succumbs to family pressure and, soon after, he and Trudy are no longer an item. This is when he ends up in the gutter, shown in the beginning of the film, pretending to have been hit by a car in a vain cry for sympathy from Trudy. It takes an act of selfless bravery, later, by Brendan to impress Trudy and she agrees to take him back - if he helps her rob Nuala's home. The excitement of the deed drives Brendan to an even grander criminal plan - steal all of the hated computers from his school. But, things go awry and Trudy ends up in jail, shielding Brendan from arrest.
When Trudy is sentenced to two years in prison, Brendan mopes around, guilt-ridden and lonely over his loss of love. Even the heroes in his movies, his only comfort in the past, seem to mock him for letting the love of his life take the rap for him. He musters the courage to visit Trudy in prison and finds she has forgiven him. He unabashedly breaks out in a song that is both joy and redemption.
"When Brendan Met Trudy" is a nice idea for a film, but is less than it could be in the hands of first time feature director Kieron J. Walsh. The helmer hales from advertising and TV and it shows in the two-dimensional nature of the story and its protagonists. The tale focuses on Brendan and his passion for film and music is an integral part of his makeup. Peter McDonald doesn't take us far below the surface of the feckless Brendan, but the offbeat love story, music and film references are entertaining.
Flora Montgomery has the harder role as the self-assured, criminally minded Trudy. Her toughness opposite Brendan's milquetoast character is supposed to be a turning of the tables with the couple reversing conventional roles of tough guy, subservient gal. Trudy is too bubbly to come across as a tough-as-nails thief, but Montgomery does her best to breathe life into her role.
There is little going on to distract the viewer from the central story. Wacky and weird family members make up the background, but they, too, fail to come across as real people, though Brendan's speak-her-mind mom (Marie Mullen) gets some shock value out of her foul-mouthed judgements.
"When Brendan Met Trudy" tries to be a romantic comedy with the leads reversing conventional roles. There isn't a firm enough hand behind the camera to control the bland script by Roddy Doyle. As such, it moves along OK and has some kitschy film references with snippets of such classics as "The Quiet Man," "Africa Queen," "The Producers" and more but fails to satisfy the film buff in me. I give it a C.
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