Movie Reviews: Aidan Gillen is a sinister mentor in Rose Plays Julie
Rose Plays Julie: a poignant treatise of adoption and relationships
All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. (15A) opens with Rose (Ann Skelly), a veterinarian student living in Dublin who discovers that she was adopted at birth. Keen to establish a relationship with her birth mother, Ellen (Orla Brady), Rose travels to London, where Ellen is an actor. When Ellen rejects Rose’s overtures, Rose becomes even more determined to insert herself into Ellen’s life.Â
Written and directed by Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor, is an ambitious story that opens as an unusual account of obsession but employs that trope as the springboard into a very different narrative. Once she has identified her birth mother, Rose wants to reach out to her father, the renowned archaeologist Peter (Aidan Gillen) — a decision that has profoundly traumatic consequences. On the surface level, Rose Plays Julie is an intense drama about the far-reaching consequences of sexual violence, and which is wholly absorbing until its overly melodramatic final act.Â
Beneath the surface it’s equally fascinating, as each character plays out a different role: Rose adopts the persona of ‘Julie’ in order to excavate the truth about Peter, who portrays himself to the world as nothing more sinister than a genial mentor of young women; Ellen, meanwhile, is forced into playing the hardest part of her life, that of a mother finally obliged to confront an agony long buried.Â
It’s a powerful tale, and one that explores the truth of each character with the painstaking precision of the conscientious archaeologist, with cinematographer Tom Comerford employing long, lingering close-ups that allow Orla Brady and Ann Skelly to convey every last nuance of their mutual pain. (cinema release)
Inspired by true events and set against the backdrop of the Great Depression, 12 Mighty Orphans (12A) opens in Texas in 1938, with Rusty Russell (Luke Wilson) appointed to teach at the Masonic School for Orphans. Assisted by the orphanage’s Doc Hall (Martin Sheen), Rusty creates an American Football team from the rag-tag band of teenage orphans, most of whom have never played football before. With only 12 players and no resources — not even a real football — Rusty and his charges are forced to think outside the box, in the process changing the way the game of American Football was played.Â
Adapted from Jim Dent’s book and directed by Ty Roberts, the story of treads a similar path to that of or , as a band of mismatched, squabbling underdogs come together to triumph against the odds. Even if it feels a little derivative, however, the movie is enjoyable on its own merits: if you can look past the cartoonishly caricatured villains of the piece — the orphanage’s manager, Frank (Wayne Knight), and the Orphans’ cigar-chomping rival coach, Luther (Lane Garrison) — this is a wholesome and timely account of how irrepressible optimism and some lateral thinking can inspire an entire nation.Â
Luke Wilson is suitably steely-eyed and square-jawed as he inspires his ‘second-class citizen’ orphan boys to use football as a means to achieve self-respect, pride and success, and he gets strong support from the avuncular Martin Sheen as the booze-sodden Doc and Jake Austin Walker as the young Hardy Brown, the powerhouse player who would overcome the tragedy of his early years to establish a ferocious reputation as a professional footballer. (cinema release)
From American Football to motor-racing, and Schumacher (12A), a documentary about the Formula 1 phenomenon. It’s not quite a rags-to-riches story, but Michael Schumacher’s ascent to the pantheon began as a go-kart racer who emerged from working-class origins to dominate the billion-dollar sport. With a wealth of material to draw upon — directors, Hanns-Bruno Kammertöns, Vanessa Nöcker and Michael Wech, employ home-movies of the teenage Schumacher along with archive interviews, straight-to-camera pieces and visceral in-car footage of various races — the film ranges far and wide across the many facets that make up Michael Schumacher, who suffered a life-changing brain injury in a skiing accident in 2013.Â
That tragedy, of course, overshadows the contributors’ accounts of the Schumacher they knew, and the film doesn’t flinch from the driver’s darker side: Schumacher, according to his peer Mark Webber, was driven by ‘a paranoid perfection’ that occasionally caused him to cross the line and endanger the lives of his fellow competitors.Â
With contributions from many of Schumacher’s peers, but most poignantly his wife Corinna, the picture that emerges is one of an instinctively shy and dedicated family man who was professionally obsessed with ‘100% perfection’ and one that reminds us that, for all the technology and roaring engines, Formula 1 racing is never about the machines. (Netflix)
