IRISH REVIEW: The Company of Wolves (1984)

Neil Jordan’s second feature certainly established him as a filmmaker who wasn’t afraid to try new things and The Company of Wolves is certainly a very different film from Angel. But is it any good?

A Freudian retelling of the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale, the film begins with a sleeping Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson), who has just stolen her sister’s lipstick. She dreams that she lives in an alternate, fairy tale world. She lives in a village constantly under threat from a large population of wolves who live in the woods. Rosaleen’s Granny (Angela Lansbury) tells her a series of stories designed to make Rosaleen cautious of the woods and the wolves inside, but which are also intended to make her wary for her growing sexuality and potentially predatory boys. Rosaleen takes note of these stories but she also has an independent streak and so when she meets the sinister Huntsman (Micha Bergese) in the woods, she is more intrigued than frightened.

The film is based on a screenplay by Jordan and Angela Carter and takes as its inspiration stories by Carter. Carter’s intention with these stories was to rewrite famous fairy tales from a less conservative and oppressive slant. She found that fairy tales were designed to teach women to fear their sexuality and taught them submissiveness. In her stories, which were loaded with Freudian imagery, the female characters are far from passive and the stories encourage women not to fear their sexuality but to take control of it. Essentially, her stories were modern, feminist version of the ancient fairy tales. The Company of Wolves sets out to do the same thing, and all of the typical elements of the fairy tale are present, albeit presented from a Freudian perspective and with a dream-like feel.

As interesting as this may sound, it is rather unsatisfying. The Freudian imagery is over-used and dated – films had been drawing parallels with Freud’s writings for years and Jordan doesn’t offer anything particularly new. The film’s symbolism is also heavy-handed. The phrase “Don’t stray from the path” – though taken from the original versions of the Little Red Riding Hood tale – and often repeated by Granny is so clearly meant to represent the rules and limits placed on women in male dominated society that it’s lack of subtlety only causes one to roll their eyes at its every repetition. Granny is here an ambiguous figure – being both loving and restrictive or, in other words, a parent. The stories that Granny tells explicitly link sex with danger, violence and death – and never with love – while the stories Rosaleen tells represent instead the power of women, particularly a story in which a wronged peasant woman somehow turns her rich abusers into wolves – the wolf (usually a symbol of predatory sexuality) presumably taking on a new significance here. This stuff, though interesting in a surface kind of way, is ultimately over-subscribed. In this day and age, how many are truly convinced that red represents a budding sexuality via menstrual blood or that fruit represents sexual organs?

Neil Jordan has claimed that the appeal he finds in the film is not the heavy Freudian symbolism, but instead the simple joys of storytelling. This argument is not wholly convincing but it does point towards the most interesting thing about The Company of Wolves. In the first half of the film, Rosaleen is told stories that are clearly intended as cautionary tales to guide her through puberty and into adulthood – a patriarchal society that is not too interested in raising strong, independent women is evident. But when she starts to tell her own stories, she takes control of her own destiny (such as it is) and reclaims certain desires as her own and not the dangerous evils that she has been taught to avoid. The film then shows the regenerative qualities of fiction, particularly in making up one’s own fictions. The film delights ultimately in making an oppressive story (Little Red Riding Hood) into a story of sexual awakening and power.

None of which particularly works with the jarring ending, in which Rosaleen reawakens from her dream at a point where she has finally become a woman in control (as represented by her becoming a wolf), only to see a wolf entering her room (read the maturation of dream Rosaleen impacting onto real life Rosaleen) and start screaming, horrified. Hardly a feminist ending. Taken together with the fact that while in the original fairy tale Red Riding Hood is either killed or saved by a man, in the film’s version she overcomes a man but nonetheless becomes a wolf on his terms, not particularly on her own. Surely this means that the meaning of the film’s version of the tale is not particularly better than those that came before, since Red Riding Hood is still waiting for a man to act for her in both cases – either to save her or point the way for her passage into womanhood.

Also problematic, and leaving the symbolism aside, is the film’s dream-like style, in which scenes follow on from each other in a off-kilter, irrational way intended to reflect the pacing of (or lack of) a dream. This has also been done before, though here it is very distancing device, which keeps one outside the film rather than inside, like listening to two people who know each other so well that their conversation is impenetrable to anyone else. Like a lot of Neil Jordan’s films, it is very cerebral and not particularly welcoming.

As interesting as the film may or may not be, it feels badly thought out. The ending would seem to be directly contradictory to all that came before and the symbolism is so obvious and so dated that it just isn’t convincing. Nonetheless, it is a fairly original film from a filmmaker who is clearly trying something new, which is something that remains worth celebrating since it is now so rare.

See also:

Angel

Michael Collins

DVD REVIEW: Michael Collins (1996)

By an odd coincidence, I watched Braveheart on the same day as Michael Collins, which offered, by way of contrast, a useful insight into why Neil Jordan’s influential biopic of one of the heroes of Ireland’s fight for independence just doesn’t work.

Michael Collins begins with the Easter Rising of 1916 and the subsequent shootings in Kilmainham Gaol, which caused public favour to fall behind the revolutionary nationalists. The film then jumps forward to 1918 and the beginnings of the War of Independence and then into the Treaty, which caused the partition of Ireland as well as the end of the war. Shortly after came the Irish Civil War between the pro-Treaty government of the Irish Republic, led provisionally by military chief Michael Collins, and the anti-Treaty rebels, incensed by the partition and Ireland’s status as a dominium of Britain, led by Éamon de Valera, Collins’ old commander and previously the President of the Irish Republic. Collins was killed at the age of 31 in Béal na mBláth, near where he was born, during a tour of West Cork.

The above is more of a potted history of Michael Collins than a description of the plot of the film, though it offers about as much insight into the history of the time as the film does. The film is primarily about the events and the circumstances and it will introduce novices to such things as the Black and Tans, the Twelve Apostles, the Cairo Gang, and the Bloody Sunday of 1920. But it does not go much further than that, readdressing each event from the perspective of an international audience and the rules of the three-act structure. As a result, it rushes through the events and loses sight of, as the title would suggest, its main subject. Michael Collins (Liam Neeson) is a bit of a cipher in the film, as is Éamon de Valera (Alan Rickman), played, for the sake of simplicity, as egotistical and unrepentantly evil. In Neil Jordan’s carefully timed and paced version of events, both characters move between a variety of registers without much sense of an inner consistency. Every decision that de Valera makes seems ridiculously stupid but it couldn’t be otherwise because the film spends no time whatsoever in trying to create a sense of what he is thinking of. Similarly, Collins is played as a fun-loving joker who will do anything that a man has to do for freedom but will be alternately ruthless and depressed about it. In Jordan’s rigid subservience to historical events, simplicity and pacing, he does both of them, and nearly every other character, a disservice.

Compared, oddly, to Braveheart, which has been named one of the most historically inaccurate films of recent times, but that nonetheless managed to convey the passions and sacrifices of a fight for national independence. Although the real events and the real life Wallace’s character are far from what the film represents, the film succeeds nonetheless as a rousing entertainment of national heroism overcoming foreign subjugation. If the facts are false, at least the emotions are not and the film represents such nationalism, as it must feel to those committed to national struggles. None of this matters as much as the fact that we never lose sight of William Wallace, the character as played by Mel Gibson. We see his inner struggles, his dark almost animalistic side, his wisdom and his refusal to deny his beliefs – and, crucially, we see how the myths that generate about Wallace are comically inaccurate. The film is simplistic, overly macho and full of falsehoods, but it is a fantastic, old-fashioned epic.

Michael Collins, meanwhile, is not. It works neither as a historical record of the events nor as a hagiographic, rousing spectacle. It ends up being a toothless beast, which fails to bring across either the character of the man (neither fictional nor real) or the significance of the events depicted. It refers to the events with an emphasis that excludes all else, but presents them so simplistically in shades of black and white that nothing of interest can be learned from them. It also refigures them to assist the sentimentalised drama and the running time. Neither does it get a sense of its characters, being both hagiographic in its attempts to make a hero out of Michael Collins and also assisting in mystifying the character more through its terribly inconsistent and unfocused characterization. Short, sporadic scenes will show a likable Collins at home and enjoying himself, but these scenes don’t add up and often feel misplaced. Elsewhere, the film shows only a man going through historical motions.

Only rarely does Jordan’s strategy make sense. We briefly get a sense of one of Jordan’s apparent trademarks, the moral complexity in his work. There are scenes that seem intended to present Collins ambiguously – leaving it up to each member of the audience to decide whether certain actions are justified or not. But these scenes are given short shrift and are only noticeable if you look for them and the rest of the film mainly contradicts them by either making it clear that Collins has no choice or guiding the argument with a simplistic representation of what is at stake. It both makes a saint of Collins and loses sight of him. The film is hence neither rousing or moving nor informative or interesting. It succeeds in being only bland.

Forgive Braveheart its falsehoods and it is a great film made in the old style – not to be taken seriously and a little hokey, but something to be swept up in and enjoyed – the kind of underdog story that Hollywood has forgotten to make since America now makes war with the underdogs. Michael Collins, meanwhile, forgiving its falsehoods, is far from emotionally engaging. Neither is it interesting in its complexity or in its storytelling. It is a grey, cold, dull film that is both contrived for the sake of entertainment and wholly lacking in entertainment.

See also:

Angel

The Company of Wolves

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