Movie review: Redemption of a Rogue is the funniest Irish movie in a generation
The humour in Redemption of a Rogue is coal-black, certainly, and not only irreverent but sacrilegious.
“As God is my witness,” declares Scarlett O’Hara in , “I’ll never be hungry again.” It’s no coincidence that (16s) revolves around Scarlett’s namesake, the upwardly mobile Rory O’Hara (Jude Law), whose job, as he tells a taxi-driver, is that of ‘a poor kid pretending to be rich.’
A stockbroker struggling to make it on Wall Street, London-born Rory takes his family — wife Allison (Carrie Coon), daughter Sam (Oona Roche) and son Ben (Charlie Shotwell) — back home to Margaret Thatcher’s London in the early 1980s, where deregulation is about to turn the city into a financial Wild West.
Handsome and charming, Rory eases his way back into harness under his old boss Arthur (Michael Culkin), and rents a farm in leafy suburbia so that Allison can open her own equestrian business. But pretending to be rich is an expensive business, and soon cracks begin to appear in the façade Rory has spent decades building up.
Written and directed by Sean Durkin, gradually lays bare Rory’s pretensions: the harder he tries to persuade the world of his worth, the more transparent he becomes, and not least to Allison, who repeatedly bails him out when his promises come up short.
Patiently told, with the emphasis on long scenes and character nuance, the story explores the erosion of a marriage and the family unit’s decay, as the children, left to their own devices in a new country and culture, struggle to cope with the seismic changes in their lives.
Jude Law is superbly cast as the chameleonic Rory, who is as dazzling as he is shallow, with Carrie Coon in terrific form as an embittered wife who has only belatedly realised that she has invested too much in her marriage to pull the plug now. (cinema / streaming release)
(16s) stars Aaron Monaghan as Jimmy Cullen, an Irish emigrant who returns to his hometown of Ballylough in Cavan, ‘the saddest town in the whole world’ and the site of the public disgrace that forced Jimmy to flee years before. No sooner is he home, however, than Jimmy accidentally kills the abusive father (Hugh O’Brien) he planned on confronting before taking his own life; but just when Jimmy and his brother Damien (Kieran Roche) are about to bury the old bully, a solicitor steps in to tell them that their father’s will stipulates that he cannot be buried in the rain.
With no sign of the Cavan rain ever stopping, Jimmy is forced to put his suicide on the back-burner, fully aware that the entire town of Ballylough wishes him dead. All of which sounds bleaker than a Beckett first draft, but this feature-length debut from writer-director Philip Doherty is actually a comedy, and arguably the funniest Irish movie in a generation.
The humour is coal-black, certainly, and not only irreverent but sacrilegious: Jimmy starts the story as the Judas who betrayed Ballylough in its time of greatest need, but is gradually reconfigured into a Messiah-like character who must make the ultimate sacrifice in laying down his own life.
Aaron Monaghan wanders through the film looking a like a refugee from one of El Greco’s more tortured religious paintings, his deadpan delivery growing increasingly funnier as Jimmy’s plight grows ever more desperate, and there’s strong support from Kieran Roche and Aisling O’Mara, who plays Masha, an East European immigrant who is the town’s resident torch singer and drug dealer.
The real star, though, is Philip Doherty’s ambitious and scabrously funny script, which simultaneously offers a parody of, and a love letter to, small-town Ireland.
(cinema release)
Set in the mid-1990s and opening in Fort William in the Scottish Highlands, (16s) follows six Catholic schoolgirls — Orla (Tallulah Grieve), Finnoula (Abigail Lawrie), Manda (Sally Messham), Chell (Rona Morison), Kylah (Marli Siu) and Kay (Eve Austin) — as they head for Edinburgh for a choir competition.
Unsurprisingly, the girls swap their school uniforms for short skirts and skimpy tops as soon as they arrive in the Big Smoke and set out on a hormone-crazed rampage through the Edinburgh streets, determined to hunt down some likely lads and start swapping saliva.
Raucous, foul-mouthed and irrepressible, the girls are nowhere as worldly-wise as they like to believe as they navigate some of the city’s less salubrious sights, but while this coming-of-age story — adapted by Michael Caton-Jones from Alan Warner’s novel — is full of talk about sex, its heart and soul is the wonderful chemistry that exists between the fractious group of young women who are determined to live life on their own terms.
Think on a booze-fuelled bender and you won’t go far wrong.
(cinema release)
