Film review: Gabriel Byrne is delightfully roguish in Death of a Ladies’ Man

A scene from Death of a Ladies’ Man.

★★★★☆

It’s a bold move, calling your film after one of Leonard Cohen’s least-loved albums, but Death of a Ladies’ Man (15A) certainly fits the bill. 

Lecturing on poetry in a Montreal university, Irish exile Sam O’Shea (Gabriel Byrne) is a hard-drinking serial philanderer who is shocked to discover that his latest wife is cheating on him. Ramping up on the hard stuff, Sam plunges into a downward spiral of ‘trippy, booze-fuelled psychosis’, during which he experiences hallucinations that include fire-breathing dragons and conversations with his dead father, Ben (Brian Gleeson).

As mid-life crises go, Sam’s is a doozy, and writer-director Matt Bissonnette has terrific fun steering his whiskey-addled hero from one emotional disaster to another (‘The heart wants what the heart wants,’ says Sam, although he might be better off listening to his liver instead).

At the core of the film is Sam’s relationship with his dead father, which gets off to an inauspicious start when Ben takes umbrage at Sam comparing him unkindly to Hamlet’s father, but gradually becomes more tender and profound as Sam — orphaned at a relatively young age — finally begins to understand the extent to which his behaviours are linked to abandonment issues.

Thankfully, Sam’s adult children are more understanding of their own father’s failings, and Karelle Tremblay and Antoine Olivier Pilon, playing Sam’s daughter and son, respectively, provide strong support.

There are also fine performances from Jessica Paré, playing a French-Canadian siren who might well prove to be Sam’s final muse, and Brian Gleeson as the gruff, unsentimental father. There’s no doubt, however, that this is Gabriel Byrne’s vehicle, and he’s delightfully roguish as the grizzled, louche Sam. As a bonus, and as you might expect, the soundtrack is chock-a-block with Leonard Cohen songs – very few of them, thankfully, from the Death of a Ladies’ Man collection. 

(Cinema release)