THE ARTS/CINEMA	FEBRUARY 23, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 8
	Borderline Case Neil Jordan has gone crazy for all things irrational, but there is a power of method in his madness By SAMANTHA HILL /DUBLIN o ask Neil Jordan, award-winning author and one of Ireland's most successful film directors, for his opinion of his own work is to unleash the flood-gates of uncertainty. His latest film, The Butcher Boy, which stars Stephen Rea, Fiona Shaw and newcomer Eamonn Owens, opens in Europe this week, but Jordan isn't about to make any promises on its behalf. "It's like anything else when you finish it. I don't know what to think," he says, in his characteristic intense-yet-distracted manner. "I'm just happy with the movie. But where it will fall, who will watch it, I just don't know. You never do." Such diffidence cannot be explained away as mere modesty. With 10 feature films, two novels, a novella, a prize-winning book of short stories and an Oscar for the screenplay of The Crying Game (1992) under his belt, Jordan, 47, is too aware of his talents for that. It may well be that his experiences in the film industry have led him to embrace screenwriter-sage William Goldman's famous Hollywood adage, "Nobody knows anything." Since his 1982 debut with Angel, Jordan has made a series of career-defying transitions from art-house golden child (Mona Lisa, The Crying Game) to mainstream black sheep (High Spirits, We're No Angels). As a result, he's known both extremes of commercial and critical success and failure. Add to this a reputation, much-resented on his part, for making politically controversial films--his last, Michael Collins (1996), engendered a storm of protest over its representation of Ireland's 1916 Easter Rising and subsequent war of independence--and who can blame him for reserving judgement? Jordan's equivocation makes most sense, however, when placed in the context of his work. Throughout his career, as both writer and director, he has turned uncertainty into an art form, and made an interrogation of the true nature of reality and perception the basis of his artistic endeavor. Anyone who witnessed Jaye Davidson's transformation in The Crying Game can never again be certain that seeing really is believing. And just as Jordan's protagonists often push the boundaries of race, gender and consciousness, so his films are stylistic hybrids, hitching together disparate genres that jostle and vie for space on the screen. While this means that Jordan doesn't always deliver narratively coherent films, his work is invariably sensual, difficult and challenging. Who else would have made a film like The Company of Wolves (1984), a psychoanalysis of the sexually repressive aspects of folklore disguised as a gothic horror film, or Mona Lisa (1986), a gangster-thriller, film noir and romantic comedy all in one? And who else, despite the unpredictable nature of and reaction to his movies, could have maintained auteur status while continuing to attract blue-chip financial backing from Hollywood studios such as Warner Bros. and DreamWorks Pictures? Jordan's career is full of improbable transitions, starting with his unusual entry into the movie business. While employed as a script consultant on 1981's Excalibur, Jordan was encouraged by director John Boorman to shoot a short documentary about the making of the film. Already a respected writer in his native Ireland, he was intrigued by cinema's ability to tell stories in several dimensions. With his parents providing the template (his father was a professor of education, his mother a painter), Jordan crossed the boundary between the verbal and the visual with relative ease. Indeed, as he reviews his schedule from an office at Ireland's Ardmore Studios (a short, and very pleasant, drive from his Dublin home), the man who thinks that "It is better not to have a sense of career" is clearly busier than ever. While The Butcher Boy is in competition at this month's Berlin Film Festival, Jordan has already completed post-production on his next film. Known as Untitled Neil Jordan Project, it is a psychological thriller starring Annette Bening and Robert Downey Jr. He's even written the screenplay for the film he'd like to do after that, an adaptation of Graham Greene's The End of the Affair. Oh, and if this father of five can find some spare time, he'd quite like to get down to writing another novel. These projects are all very much of his own making. A true auteur, Jordan is far happier directing films for which he has written the screenplay, and about which he is passionate. After all, he points out drily, "making films is my job so it's got to be something really compelling." And tales don't come much more compelling than The Butcher Boy. The film, a beautiful and disturbing chamber piece, is an adaptation of Patrick McCabe's 1992 novel, which won the Irish Times Award for Literature. Set in a rural town in early 1960s Ireland, The Butcher Boy tells the story of "the incredible Francie Brady" (Eamonn Owens), a young boy whose tenuous grasp on reality is slowly loosened by a series of crushing personal losses--his mother's suicide, sexual abuse by a priest, abandonment by his best friend, the death of his father. In an attempt to blame someone for these irrational cruelties, Francie fixes on a local woman, Mrs. Nugent (Fiona Shaw), who becomes the target of his scathing wit, growing anger, and finally of his shocking violence. This darkly comic fable about the space between sanity and insanity is classic Jordan territory, with Francie as the mythical changeling. In the novel, Francie's resilient, callous and savagely humorous first-person narrative impels the reader at break-neck speed. It was the apparent impossibility of recreating this voice on film that first attracted Jordan to the project. "I knew that the film had to be centered around a voice-over in a way that films rarely are," he says. "I was going through the book picking up phrases, little things he says, even inventing. I began to speak the way he did, and for about two weeks walking around London this voice became embedded in my brain." His possession has paid off. Stephen Rea's extraordinary voice-over is more than just a mechanism for exposition; it is a character in itself. Francie's disembodied voice opens the film at an amused distance, as if his older self were merely taking a backwards glance at his misspent youth. Slowly, as Rea's voice-over merges and interferes with the on-screen action, the words both inside and outside Francie's head draw the audience into his confusion. Jordan says he wanted his audience "to observe this descent into madness from inside, without realizing [they] were going there. To sympathize with the monster you have to embrace his point of view and weep for him." This shared experience is reinforced by an expressionistic use of color, lighting and (most successfully) soundtrack to create a child's-eye view of the world. And as this particular child's eyes are genuinely hallucinatory, the film presents a crazy patchwork of B-movie aliens, comic-strip logic, nuclear explosions and even visions of the Virgin Mary (demurely played by Sinead O'Connor). While this might seem confusing, for once Jordan's trademark stylistic experimentations and narrative distractions spring organically from an irrational subject. The film's many transitions between sentimentality and Grand Guignol are both accessible and truthful. Jordan's admiration for McCabe's novel, which he calls "one of the best pieces of Irish fiction since I've been reading," is clear; and the feeling is clearly mutual. McCabe, who co-wrote the screenplay, has called the experience "the sweetest symmetry that I as a writer have known." A novelist himself, Jordan is unusually incisive about how films can go places words cannot follow. His long-time producer Stephen Woolley believes that "His strength, as someone who loves literature, is to get into the soul of the book...He lets the book breathe, he breathes life into it." Having previously adapted prose works by Angela Carter and Anne Rice for the screen, Jordan believes that The Butcher Boy inhabits similar thematic territory, "where the real, rational explanations of the world aren't sufficient." That McCabe had located his world in a distant, apolitical place in Ireland's past was also something of a relief for Jordan. Although fiercely proud of Michael Collins, he is still angered at the way the film was interrogated. "It was a bit like being commissioned to carve one of those equestrian statues or a piece of monumental sculpture," he reflects. "You're answerable to people in a way that is beyond the movie, and I don't feel that people like myself should be answerable in that way." Nevertheless, Jordan admits to finding the smaller canvas of The Butcher Boy somewhat intimidating after his recent foray into big-budget Hollywood action movies. "There was nothing there but intimacy and acting, no bravura or Sturm und Drang to hide behind as a director," he says. What its unique yet universally resonant world has enabled Jordan to do, however, is call on his personal experience of growing up in 1960s Ireland--all religious fanaticism and light-hearted mysticism--without the need to place it in a wider socio-political context. In fact, judging by the skill with which he has realized it, Francie's ambivalent world is a place in which Jordan feels at home. Which is all the more reason he might cherish this precious time, just before a film moves from private shadow play to public property, its future still unpredictable. And really, what's to worry? As the Virgin Mary tells Francie, "Don't go bothering your head about it. The world goes one way and we go another." Not that Jordan doesn't appreciate being able to go his own way in an industry known for cookie-cutter creativity. "I'm very lucky to be able to do it, and if I can continue to do it and to get some meaning out of it, then that's good enough for me," he says. Ireland's prince of prevarication can rest assured that it might just be good enough for us, too.
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