|
|
|---|
Into the West
Papa Riley .......... Gabriel Byrne
Kathleen
............ Ellen Barkin
Ossie ............... Ciaran
Fitzgerald
Tito ................ Ruaidhri
(Rory) Conroy
Grandfather
......... David Kelly
Tracker ............. Johnny Murphy
Barreller ........... Colm
Meaney
Hartnett ............ John Kavanagh
Miramax
presents a film directed by Mike Newell. Produced by Jonathan Cavendish and Tim Palmer. Written by Jim
Sheridan. Based on a story by Michael Pearce.
Photographed by Tom Sigel. Edited by Peter Boyle. Music by Patrick
This is a very wonderful film,
starring two excellent boy actors (around 12 and 10) and Gabriel Byrne as their father. They are Irish, "Travellers," specifically. That is the name of
a tribe of "Celtic Gypsies."
The father lost his wife in the
birth of the second son. Formerly the "prince of the travellers," he is now wracked with guilt and
drunk most of the time. Though he dearly loves his sons, he hasn't the
heart to give them a decent upbringing. Their real home is in the Gypsy
camps, but as the film begins they are all out of place: in the city, in a
grubby apartment.
Grandfather appears on the scene and
gives to the boys a wonderful white horse, which grandfather envelops in
mythology about the horse's mystical origin. The boys bring the horse
into their apartment, which riles the neighbors and the
law. Eventually, the horse falls into the hands of a rich man
who plans to use him as a champion jumper. But the boys kidnap
the horse, who takes them on a journey of discovery. On his
back, they elude their pursuers and visit the grave of the
boys' mother. Byrne and some Traveller
trackers are close behind, and the gravesite provokes closure to the bitter experiences of
the past. Eventually they all reach the sea, boys, horse, trackers, the rich oppressor, the bad lawmen and one
good lawman. The horse goes into the water, and the youngest boy, nearly
drowning, has a vision of the mother he never knew. The horse disappears,
going back to his mystical origin; and the family is ready to
return home to the Traveller camp and make a new
start.
Production values are terrific:
photography, dialogue, direction. The basic plot (a lot of people chasing
kids on a horse) is pretty uninteresting; but the handling of it is
really gripping.
It seems to be based on the
psychological idea that you need to go back and relive traumatic events in
order to put them behind you. The boy's near-drowning experience seems to
be a reliving of the birth trauma which killed his mother, and
the encounters at the grave of the wife seem to bring her back to
her loved ones in a metaphorical sense. The mysticism, however,
shows more than pop-psychology: a kind of invisible hand of
providence guiding events. The boys do pray, and the prayer is answered.
It's a good movie for families: no
sex or violence, but very profound in content. It gives us an impressive
view of a culture I never was aware of before. At one level, kids
can understand the film, and its deeper dimensions will challenge them.
Theologically, the movie says that there are times when our total inability to help ourselves becomes obvious and overwhelming. Its answer does not reach to the fullness of the biblical gospel. But the film assumes an already existing belief in God and in Christ-- or at least the Virgin Mary (for whom the boys' mother is a kind of surrogate); and it says that such faith can help us to put the terrible past behind us and reach on to the future. There is a lot of Irish blarney in the movie-- superstitious mythologizing-- but there is something genuinely biblical here too.