THIS is the first movie with an Irish theme that has an epic sweep, something like Warren Beatty's Reds. It is also gripping entertainment as a political thriller, dominated by Liam Neeson's tour de force performance. It is a visual spectacle that pulls out all the stops. There is painstaking attention to period detail. I liked the dovetailing of the original black-and-white footage at the end.
All the acting was good. Kitty Kiernan comes across as very similar to the woman revealed in her letters to Collins, which I have read. She was obviously a bit of a ninny. There is humour in the film, too, although it is a political weepie centring on a tragic hero.
Liberties are taken with historical accuracy. The Beal na mBlath episode is distorted. The idea of Dev having a hand in Collins's assassination does not correspond with the facts as we know them.
This film is a biopic of a great man and, as such, it simplifies things. Collins is the hero. Dev is a caricature. Griffith and Cathal Brugha dwindle into cyphers. But to depict Collins as pulling all the strings is a distortion. Tom Barry was the main director of the guerrilla campaign outside Dublin and he doesn't even appear. The danger of making a movie about a "great man" is that you diminish the contributions of others.
A film-maker is entitled to take these kinds of liberties as long as he does not claim that his film is historically accurate. I find the film censor's reasoning for giving the film a PG Cert fatuous. This film is not an educational documentary about the 1916-1923 period. The cinema is not the place for history lessons. History teachers all over the country must make this clear.
The scrupulous attention Jordan gives to period detail is not given to the historical and political context. If a non-specialist person is watching the film and sees the scenes of argy-bargy in the Dail, he is not going to know what is going on because we don't see the election in December 1918, which gave the campaign a legal charter.
Collins was more than just a broth-of-a-boy swashbuckler. He had a serious philosophy about how Ireland was going to be economically and otherwise. He was, for example, the talented organiser of the Dail Loan. Because of this, the Chicago gangster-style element of the film is a little unnerving.
The question has been asked: would scenes like the car-bomb explosion give aid and comfort to the Provos? I don't think so. The movie doesn't say anything about the Provos, good, bad, or indifferent. And it is no more anti-British than you would expect.
The world in which Collins moved so frenetically was very much a man's world and the film is convincing in this regard. Jordan has chosen to omit Collins's womanising - even his few scenes with Kitty only involve some half-hearted smooching.
The rough masculine camaraderie in the film reflects very much what we know about Collins. His exchanges with his subordinates are well caught and explain the origin of their deep respect for him.
I think it was courageous for an Irish production team and the Hollywood sponsors to bring out a movie called Michael Collins - no compromise about the title. It is a film with class and artistic dignity. There may be some angst in Fianna Fail quarters but Cork people will like the film. Neeson even gets the accent almost right.