THE DEVIL'S OWN
[Spoilers]
A film review by Brian Rohan
Copyright 1997 Brian Rohan
Sympathy For The Devil
Engaging Characters and Strong Acting Almost Make Up For a Plot That Goes Nowhere, Fast
The Devil's Own Starring Harrison Ford, Brad Pitt, Ruben Blades, Margaret Colin, Treat Williams and Paul Ronan. Columbia Pictures/ Rated R
THE most surprising thing about The Devil's Own is certainly not the plot, which in terms of predictability often places somewhere between sunrise and taxes. Instead, the greatest surprise is the very fact that this rumored Hollywood disaster, this IRA version of Heaven's Gate, a film which seemed destined to become known as MacIshtar, is actually not that bad after all. With two weeks to go before its March 26th release, The Devil's Own has long been considered dead on arrival. Reports of the film's demise have been widespread, beginning with the shooting of the film in New York last summer and climaxing dramatically in late January with public denunciations by one of the film's two leading men, Brad Pitt.
"Twenty pages of dogshit," was Pitt's recollection of the Devil's Own script, as told to Newsweek.
"[The Devil's Own] was the most irresponsible bit of filmmaking -- if you can even call it that -- that I've ever seen. I couldn't believe it. I don't know why anyone would want to continue making that movie."
In addition to Mr. Pitt's complaints were the howls of Hollywood journalists, horrified by The Devil's Own many delays, script rewrites, and most of all, budget figures.
"The budget has soared from an estimated sixty million dollars to ninety million," reported The New Yorker, almost four months and surely another few million dollars ago, in November. The gossip columnists' condemnation of director Alan Pakula's spending habits were such that one would think the money was theirs. Haven't there been plenty of on-set disasters which turned out to on-screen classics? What about Apocalypse Now? Wasn't that film also a mess before it was recognized as a great?
Yes, but of course that hardly means there will be a Hearts of Darkness made about The Devil's Own. The IRA thriller is a greatly flawed mess in search of an ending. It will most definitely be slated by the critics and will be very lucky to break even. But as stated above, it's not our money....
***
THE film begins in 1972 in a rural cottage outside Belfast, where we see young Frankie McGuire listening to his dad, who is saying Grace. The potatoes are still warm when the door is kicked in by men in balaclavas, guns blazing. Frankie's eyes are frozen as his father -- whom we hear later was some form of republican sympathizer -- is gunned down by the unidentified gunmen.
The incident is all young Frankie needs to become, within the next 20 years, the most feared of IRA weapons. A closed-door strategy meeting among security force officials reveals as much -- the adult terrorist, McGuire, must be brought down at all costs, the troops are informed. Just as the 1972 killing of his father was all McGuire needed to forge a life of mayhem, so too is that life of mayhem all the British Army and Northern Ireland police need to custom-order the assassination of McGuire. A policy of shoot-to-kill is put into effect.
As the twenty something McGuire, Pitt is a quietly seething force. With the confidence and bravery known only to leading men, McGuire is a daredevil in Belfast fire-fights, though all around him his IRA buddies are shot to bits. "Where's Frankie McGuire?," hisses a menacing British army agent, immediately recalling the "Where's Sean?" mantra of an earlier IRA movie, 1992's Patriot Games.
Unlike Patriot Games, the IRA man in The Devil's Own is portrayed as justified in his actions and decent in his intentions, although his mission is ultimately more important than the human lives of even those close to him. Frankie McGuire is shown to have friends and also to have affection, but he'll gladly detonate both if the need arises.
This is evident when we next meet McGuire, on a missile-purchasing mission in New York, in the spring of 1993.
"Isn't this crazy?," says McGuire's increasingly unsure IRA buddy, played by Paul Ronan. "Us trying so hard to bring missiles over there, and them only waiting to shoot us?"
Phelan makes a brief attempt at talking McGuire out of it all: peace is in the air; we'll only be killed and forgotten; and besides, isn't New York a wonderful place? But McGuire, as determined as any Hollywood heavy, brushes him off and sets out to buy some missiles.
Alan Pakula, the Devil's Own director, obviously felt it necessary to justify his IRA character's actions even beyond the 1972 death of Frankie McGuire's father. McGuire is shown entering Newark Airport on February 23, 1993, a date which is surely no coincidence. In real-life -- but not mentioned in the movie -- the date is exactly three weeks after the first-ever U.S. visit by republican leader Gerry Adams. It was a grim time for Northern Ireland supporters of the IRA, which would not declare a ceasefire for several more bloody months, on September 1st. In February, there were many within the IRA who were urging peace, leading to the ceasefire six months later, but (the fictional) Frankie McGuire was surely not one of them.
"If we could only take one of them down," laments McGuire, referring to the flocks of Army helicopters over Northern Ireland. "Then we'd get them to listen."
(Obviously, the Devil's Own screenwriters did their homework in this regard -- judging by the real-life busts of IRA gun-running missions over the past two decades, surface-to-air missiles has been a priority.)
McGuire appropriates the name of 'Rory Devaney' (though for some reason he doesn't bother with a disguise or even a haircut) and enters a familiar network of sympathetic Irish Americans. Chief among them is a wealthy and powerful judge, played by George Hearn, who is involved in a 'Project Children'-type effort connecting wayward and unemployed Irish youths with generous American families. New York Police sergeant Tom O'Meara (Harrison Ford), as a favor to his old friend the judge, allows 'Rory Devaney' to crash in the basement of his suburban home.
Unknown to the O'Meara family, the judge is something other than a benevolent Project Children type and 'Rory Devaney' is more than an unemployed youth in need of a start. The judge provides a sack full of fresh hundreds, and it's McGuire/Devaney's job to convert them into dead helicopters.
It is in the O'Meara household that Devil's Own has its finest moments. Harrison Ford plays a veteran cop in a house full of females -- his wife, Sheila, (played by Margaret Colin) and their three daughters, aged approximately five, eleven and perhaps fourteen. The three daughters immediately fall in love with this mysterious basement-dweller with the funny accent, providing some genuinely touching domestic scenes, thankfully free of Hollywood cutesiness. Sergeant O'Meara's high school-aged daughter is mortified when the youngest child asks 'Devaney' at the dinner table whether he has a girlfriend. The tension is delightfully real; tellingly, the drama over corned beef and cabbage is much more effective than that which takes place later, over Stingers and AK-47s.
As the Provo-beneath-the-stairs, McGuire moves quickly in acquiring the goods. A plan is hatched to buy missiles from a shadowy Irish American businessman, Billy Burke (played by Treat Williams), who toasts dead Fenians in his shamrocked Manhattan saloon (locals will recognize the set as the historic Old Town tavern). It is evident from the beginning -- especially to Frankie McGuire -- that Billy Burke's loyalties are closer to his own wallet. Without getting into specifics and giving away too much of the plot, trouble begins when the visiting IRA men fall afoul of the local Irish American mobsters. Frankie McGuire is loyal to a fault, but his mobbed-up ethnic cousins are as reliable as the weather.
Thus also begins the unraveling of the relationship between McGuire and Sgt. O'Meara. There is much for O'Meara to question at this point in his middle-aged life: the sudden realization that his NYPD partner -- played by Ruben Blades -- as well as the Irish kid in the basement, are something other than what was advertised. The NYPD angle is merely a distraction though, as O 'Meara copes with the newly-discovered identity of the son he never had. It is here that the bottom starts to fall out of The Devil's Own. Sgt. O'Meara's loyalties and motivations are all over the place, as if, well, as if they were taken from several different screenplays. The movie stumbles on to an end which is, at best, anti-climactic, but not before Alan Pakula's production allows the audience a little bit of fun.
For instance, there is the emergence on U.S. soil of a British Army agent, identified by Harrison Ford's character as a member of the S.A.S., or Special Air Service. In a characterization which will surely make the London tabloids howl in protest, this character is slightly less charming than Darth Vader. We have already seen him coldly assassinate an already-wounded member of Frankie McGuire's IRA unit in Belfast, and it is made clear that he is in the U.S. to do the same to Frankie McGuire.
"We have already gotten everyone else in his unit," explains the SAS agent, suggesting that McGuire's unit has resisted the rest of the IRA's move toward peace. Sergeant O'Meara, although he disagrees strongly with armed republicanism and is repulsed when he learns of McGuire's involvement, nonetheless decides not to help the British agent. This leads to a memorable confrontation between the snarling spy from London and the narrowback cop from Brooklyn.
"What exactly is your relationship to Frankie McGuire?," snarls the agent. "After all, you are Irish, are you not, Sergeant O'Meara?" O'Meara, livid at the implication, shoots back incredulously, "Yeah, but so's Cardinal O'Connor."
***
SADLY, the hissing British agent, like so much else in the early parts of The Devil's Own, vanishes into thin air. It is a movie filled with loose ends and dangling plotlines, which is surely the result of too many competing screenplays and egos.
Politically, The Devil's Own is likely to cause plenty of problems overseas. There is no mention of Frankie McGuire's unionist-minded neighbors, which must have seemed okay to the screenwriters since Frankie McGuire seems to care far more about military revenge than he does political ideals (concepts such as partition or re-unification are never discussed). The only unionist-type we meet in the entire movie is the above-mentioned SAS agent. As regards the history of American involvement in IRA matters, the film is more accurate and understanding than any of Hollywood's other recent IRA thrillers (the main ones being Patriot Games and 1994's Blown Away). Bits and pieces of the plot resemble events in a number of real-life gun-running operations: the early 1980s Valhalla operation out of Boston, for example, as well as the numerous attempts at buying Stingers over the past fifteen years. More importantly, the character of Sergeant O'Meara points to a depth previously unseen for his stereotype -- the character is Irish American, somewhat sentimental, and is also a blue-collar member of the New York City police force. Yet this does not make him a de facto supporter of the IRA. At the same time, neither is O'Meara blindly condemning of the IRA. Harrison Ford's character, while disagreeing strongly with armed republicanism, states how he understands the anger-fueled motivations of republicans like McGuire. "Can't they get the bastards?" O'Meara asks Frankie, referring to the men who killed the senior McGuire, in 1972.
"They are the bastards," responds Frankie.
There's no other way but to hit them back, asserts McGuire, and although O'Meara does not agree, he understands. Such complexity of character, acted by a seasoned, affable professional such as Harrison Ford, make The Devil's Own stand out above its IRA-themed predecessors.
Unfortunately, it is not enough. The movie's characters are eminently engaging for the first 60% of the film, before the plot is pulled from beneath them like a rug. The film's ends with a dud, when it clearly needed a bang, and is ultimately less than satisfying.
Which begs the question: it is possible for the Hollywood to make a meaningful, character-driven IRA-themed story and simultaneously deliver a sophisticated thriller? The jury is still out on that one. For better or for worse, the real-life material which inspires stories such as The Devil's Own will be around long after this movie has gone to video.
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