REVIEW: Angel (1982)

  Angel was Neil Jordan’s (The Company of Wolves, The Crying Game, Michael Collins, The Butcher Boy, Breakfast on Pluto and Ondine) directorial debut, made in 1982, and it stars regular Stephen Rea (all of the above, as well as Trojan Eddie, The Last of the High Kings, A Further Gesture, This Is My Father, I Could Read The Sky, On The Edge, Evelyn, Bloom, The Halo Effect, Tara Road, Kisses, Nothing Personal (2009) and Stella Days). Though Angel is set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, the film is a much more abstract examination of the evils of violence. The film also has, in slight roles, Donal McCann (Poitín, Cal, Budawanny, The Dead, December Bride and The Nephew) and the ubiquitous Gerard McSorley (Taffin, In The Name of the Father, Words Upon The Window Pane, Widows' Peak, Moondance, Nothing Personal (1995), Michael Collins, Some Mother's Son, The Butcher Boy, The Boxer, Dancing At Lughnasa, Agnes Browne, Angela's Ashes, Ordinary Decent Criminal, On The Edge, Bloody Sunday, Dead Bodies, Veronica Guerin, The Halo Effect, Omagh, Inside I'm Dancing, Middletown, The Front Line, Trapped, Mr Crocodile in the Cupboard, Wide Open Spaces, Swansong: Story of Occi Byrne).

  Stephen Rea plays Danny, a saxophone player in a band that tours around the country. After one performance, three balaclava-wearing gangsters kill his manager and a girl that he was seeing while Danny watches helplessly on. Danny decides to swap the saxophone for a machine gun and goes out in search of vengeance.

  Angel appears to be a straight-forward action thriller/vigilante yarn, albeit one with a limited budget, not unlike Jordan’s more recent, thoroughly ghastly The Brave One, but it soon becomes something much more abstract, and much more pretentious. At one point, a rather pointless conversation turns towards a poster of an Antonioni film, Jordan’s apparent influence. Indeed, the film is very distanced and has at least a vague focus on the surrounding landscape, though it seems more of a style choice than a thematic one. There are quite a few quotations as well, as if the film need only quote the works of famous writers in order to be as artistic or as profound. The film is also horridly vague and wandering, again as if an exercise in Antonioni-like near-plotless rambling is the only way to achieve artistic merit. Angel ultimately ends up being as superficial and meaningless as any similarly themed exploitation fodder. And that’s before one engages with what the film is attempting to talk about.

  Angel is about the evils of violence and the senselessness of violent action and of the damage it wrecks on the mind of the perpetrator, as Danny does ultimately come to appear at the very least unhinged. Pointed as it was presumably meant to be, it is hopelessly lost, not least in the film’s slipshod denouement in which the bad guy is speedily revealed and then disposed off by a cop who does not seem troubled by his own act of violence. The film seems to suggest that some violence is justifiable and will not destroy one’s mind, though it is hopelessly vague about how one determines the difference between good and bad violence. Again, it is the police and the state that seem to have the monopoly on morality and ethics – a conclusion that looks forward to Neil Jordan’s equally superficial and almost fascist The Brave One. The setting then becomes a problem with the film’s conclusion about violence ringing false in terms of the conflict in Northern Ireland, the specifics of which the film makes great efforts to avoid. The violence perpetrated by the state is unequivocally just and any corruption and evil are individual problems that can be easily dealt with, rather than institutional problems that are more complicated than anything this film dares deal with.

  The main problem with Angel, however, is not that it does not work as the art film that it so desperately wants to be, but more that its aspirations to great art thwart any other enjoyment that could be gained from the film. The plot is not exciting and the performance are too withdrawn, the actors merely goes through the motions and allowing the humanity to be staged and choreographed out of them. Ultimately, the film is full of narrative hiccups (the sequence with the woman who cuts his hair) and it is too deliberate and pre-meditated to be surprising in any way. The problem is not that the film has absolutely nothing to say that is worth hearing, it is that it can’t work on any other level beyond aborted art film.

  Angel is ultimately a messy film that trips itself up on its way towards for complexity and artistry. More like the work of Tomas Alfredson than that of Michelangelo Antonioni, it is a film that is too pretentious to be merely sufficient as a guilty genre pleasure and too superficial to be intellectually engaging. It ought to please no one and irritate many.

See also:
The Company of Wolves
Michael Collins

REVIEW: Trapped/ Anton (2012)

  Trapped AKA Anton is a low-budget straight-to-DVD Irish film, originally entitled Anton, which was shot in 2008 on location in Cavan. Trapped is set in 1972, beginning on the day after Bloody Sunday, and deals with the Troubles and its effect on one man’s family.

Anton O’Neill (played writer/co-producer Anthony Fox) returns from a long time away at sea, after hearing the call of his homeland, an initially idyllic little Cavan town near the North-South border. There, he is reunited with his brother Edward (Cillian Roche), his old friend Brendan (Andy Smith) and his wife Maria (Laura Way). However, it is not long before Anton begins to get bored with this slow rural life, where farming and drinking seem to be the only preoccupations.

Anton falls back with Brendan, an angry young man who is adamant to go up North and help in the struggles against the British Army. Anton is unconvinced until the army stops his family on the road and proceeds to humiliate them. Following that, Anton and Brendan rob a post office across the border. This crime throws Anton into an increasingly violent conflict with the menacing and bigoted local Gardai detective Lynch (Gerard McSorley) and a ruthless IRA man Diarmuid (Vincent Fegan), just as his family needs him the most.

Though the plot outline above may seem fairly easy to follow, the film’s awkward pacing leaves a lot of questions unanswered. In the space of the first ten minutes, we are introduced to Anton as well as every character named above and the political and historical setting is established. The film opens with one of Anton’s letters to Maria, telling her that he is returning because he feels the call of his wife, his family and his country. However, he is almost immediately swayed into crime and away from his family. Anton’s motivations completely shift and the only conceivable reason for this is a rather uneventful and somewhat comically overplayed run-in with the British Army. It is unclear whether it is boredom or anger or the influence of others that leads him to neglect his family and dabble in terrorism and murder.

However, this problem is easily forgotten as the film bombards you with more and more information. Maria finds out about the robbery, Anton is beaten by Lynch’s men, Edward is sexually abused with a truncheon by Lynch’s men, Maria has a run-in with the British, Anton and Edward are captured by the IRA and then Maria has a miscarriage. All of this happens in the next ten minutes and the one impression that all of it leaves is that the film is a hopeless mess. One particularly long prison/asylum plot strand is disastrous. In fact, the whole film feels like the backstory until seventy minutes in, at which time every character is finally where they need to be and the film itself can begin. In the final twenty minutes, the film does improve and might actually make you care, if by then you really want to.

The film’s plot, which is it’s most problematic aspect, continues in this manner for most of the film, and leads to the film’s second problem. Trapped has no characters. As the film is packed with incident, it has no time to slow down and create believable characters, ones that an audience might want to emphasize with. We only know that we should feel bad for Anton because the score tells us too. And though a miscarriage would normally make a character rethink their priorities, no sooner has Anton found out about it that he is off to Belfast to hear Diarmuid tell him why the IRA is so brilliant. However, Anton is not the only character that does not make sense. Edward goes from tortured informant to happy country bumpkin who only wants to have a family to gun-toting sidekick. Worst, however, is the character of Detective Lynch, played by Gerard McSorley, presumably to give the film some marquee value. McSorley was brilliant in the 2004 TV film Omagh, but he is less than convincing as a hardened and bigoted thug. However, the filmmakers themselves seem to become aware of this, as Lynch’s character becomes softer and softer. Eventually he is actually concerned about Anton’s plight, despite having not too long before assaulted Edward with a truncheon and poked a gun into a pregnant Maria’s stomach. Though most of the cast equip themselves reasonably well, none of them have been given roles to really sink their teeth into.

The third problem with the film is its refusal to engage with the politics of the situation. Not unlike Godard’s great Le Petit Soldat, in which a French spy during the Algerian War becomes disillusioned with politics, Trapped seems to be a film that is trying to present a politically confused character caught between two violent sides. We never know quite why Anton decides to join the IRA, but maybe Anton doesn’t know either. However, at one point, Anton rather comically states, “I made a difference to people who didn’t have the rights of a dog.” By this point, it is known to the audience that Anton has done nothing but foul up. Anton becomes not merely a politically confused character, but a rather troubling one. The filmmakers don’t address how Anton could possibly think he has done anything of worth, instead offering only the typical Hollywood lesson about the importance of family. Anton becomes only a cipher and the filmmakers’ own politics and morals come under question - are they trying to suggest that Anton is a hero, a thug, a schizophrenic or a hopelessly foolish innocent? If Trapped is a film about a politically confused character, it suffers from becoming politically confused itself. Though this may be cleared up by the film’s end, it remains unclear why the filmmakers took such a vacuous and rather thoughtless approach to what was such a problematic time.

Trapped wants to be a thriller about one man trying to save his family during the Troubles, but it overloads itself with plot and refuses to have any understandable or likeable characters. Their motivations constantly shift to accommodate the film’s terrible plotting. Along with some questionable politics and a stodgy script, the film is messy, bland and unconvincing.