A new film captures the complex personality of the murdered journalist, writes Michael Dwyer.
Dramatising well-chronicled recent events on screen is a challenge that has defeated many film-makers, with very few successfully transforming them into gripping thrillers, as the late Alan J. Pakula achieved with his Watergate drama, All the President's Men.
The film reviewers of the Irish media were joined by a few dozen journalists from Dublin newsrooms yesterday morning for the first media screening anywhere of Veronica Guerin, the new film starring Cate Blanchett.
The new Hollywood movie is the second feature film to be based on the life and death of the former Sunday Independent reporter who was murdered seven years ago this month.
The film will have its world première at the Savoy in Dublin on July 8th, an invitational event for which no tickets will be sold, followed by a reception at Dublin Castle. It goes on Irish release from July 11th, followed by its UK release on August 1st and a US release from October 17th.
While the film seems assured of attracting a substantial Irish audience - having the advantage of telling a story so familiar to Irish viewers - it also faces an obstacle in this country, because of the sheer familiarity of that story from the mass of media coverage it generated.
The first feature film to deal with the Guerin story was the 2000 production When the Sky Falls, which starred Joan Allen as the journalist. While that film did fair business at the Irish box-office, it made negligible impact in the UK and failed to secure a cinema release in the US.
This new film is an honourable and responsible attempt. It has nothing new to tell the substantial Irish audience who will be familiar with its outline and key plot elements, nor does it illuminate the story and the activities of its protagonists with any depth of insight.
Not surprisingly, in that context, it begins at the end, on June 26th, 1996, as Guerin is driving back to Dublin from the courthouse in Naas and her assassin draws up on a motorcycle and cold-bloodedly shoots her.
An extended flashback chronicles the events of the two previous years before returning to the murder - a sequence that, for all its inevitability, retains the power to shock the viewer.
The film is most successful in capturing the complex personality of Guerin herself, and a great deal of the credit is due to the remarkable Australian actress, Cate Blanchett, who inhabits the role with an almost eerie authenticity.
Not only does she manage to look uncannily like Guerin herself in the film - and she crucially pulls this off in the intense close-up shots - but she also achieves a convincing accent that strongly resembles Guerin's familiar voice.
As the film charts the key events in the last two years of Guerin's young life, it depicts her as a brave, dogged and unconventional reporter, while at the same time rather naïve and ultimately reckless. She emerges as someone who could not have been invented if she did not exist, someone whose callous murder triggered urgent action against the drugs barons by the government and its agencies.
The film also notes the cynicism of other journalists towards Guerin and her unorthodox modus operandi. Passing a bar frequented by the media, she decides not to go in, commenting, "I know what they say about me."
Later, after she has been shot in the leg by a gangster at her home, some of the regulars in the same bar joke that she might usefully use the insurance money to take a course in journalism.
Guerin's relationship with her employers at the Sunday Independent is also questioned. The editor, Aengus Fanning - Emmet Bergin, who played Dick Moran for years in Glenroe, in an uncanny physical transformation - tells Guerin after she is shot in the leg that she has to stop reporting crime. "Write about fashion, write about football," he says. "What if I told you that I wouldn't publish your stuff?"
Two scenes later, a double-decker bus drives past, emblazoned with elaborate Sunday Independent advertising for Guerin's columns.
The screenplay is credited to the US-based Dubliner, Carol Doyle, and the US screenwriter Mary Agnes Donoghue.
Towards the end of the credits, Ireland's new Ombudsman and Information Commissioner, Emily O'Reilly, who wrote a book on Guerin, is credited with additional research.
The film's director, Joel Schumacher - the US film-maker who gave Irish actor Colin Farrell his breakthrough role in Tigerland, and recently reunited with him for Phone Booth - keeps the drama moving at a lively pace, making strikingly effective use of distinctive Dublin locations - close on 100 of them. The majority of the crew is Irish, as are all the cast with the exception of Blanchett.
As is so often the case, the actors playing the villains have the meatiest roles. While Brenda Fricker and Barry Barnes, cast as Guerin's mother and husband, have relatively thankless parts, Gerard McSorley brings a truly intimidating presence to the role of gangster John Gilligan.
The scene in which he brutally beats Guerin when she doorsteps him is graphically violent, and he is even more sinister when he is shown to phone her, threatening to kidnap and rape her young son, and then murder her.
There are also vividly etched performances from Ciaran Hinds as John Traynor, Paudge Behan as Brian Meehan, Alan Devine as Gerard Hutch aka The Monk, Gerry O'Brien in the fifth portrayal of Martin Cahill on screen in recent years, and Laurence Kinlan as a young junkie in an arresting early sequence set in a Dublin flats complex where the street is littered with syringes.
The ubiquitous Colin Farrell appears briefly in a cameo role, as a fellow Manchester United supporter who tries to pick up Guerin on the street.
The film's producer, Jerry Bruckheimer, is regarded as the most successful in cinema today, having produced such big-budget blockbusters as Top Gun, The Rock, Con Air, Armageddon, and Pearl Harbor. His new project, King Arthur, is about to begin shooting in Ireland. The Guerin film is one of his lower-budget ventures, at around $20 million.