THE film Michael Collins has left American critics scratching their heads. For most of them there is something about the film that does not work but they can't agree what it is.
Is it history or is it a thriller? If it's history, American audiences will be lost trying to follow Neil Jordan's compression of the six most turbulent years of Irish history into 117 minutes.
If it's a thriller with a tenuous connection to historical fact, then Irish Americans and critics who know their Irish history and have read the Tim Pat Coogan books will carp at the liberties taken with the life of this tragic figure.
Then there is the problem of whether the film glorifies the IRA and, by extension, its latter day version, as the bombs go off in British streets and President Clinton denounces this "vicious" terrorism.
An early poster for the film showing Collins leaping over a barricade brandishing a rifle was withdrawn by Warner Bros. The new poster has him in civvies and brandishing a fist in Jim Larkin mode.
Everyone agrees that Liam Neeson is "near perfect" in the role, as Time puts it. Poor Julia Roberts gets tougher treatment. While the author of The Year of the French, Thomas Flanagan, writing in the Sunday New York Times, says she "possesses the most superb smile since the invention of faces", Newsweek describes her as "rather wan" and faults Jordan's "failure to write her a part". Newsday says she is "impossible to watch".
For USA Today, Julia Roberts is "distractingly shoe horned into a weighty political drama". She "seems out of her depth".
The New Yorker critic grumbles about having "to sit through a Sinead O'Connor song which appears to be the statutory penalty for watching any film about Ireland regardless of the period". But overall, Anthony Lane finds the film, "for an Irish work of art astonishingly untalkative and a refreshingly blarney free zone ... what Jordan has made, in fact, is a thriller".
The magazine's highest praise is for the skills of Chris Menges, director of photography, who "rocks us with syncopated explosions". Roberts pleases this critic for a "smiling relaxation in her that I thought had gone for good".
Janet Maslin of the New York Times damns with faint praise what she calls Jordan's "least daringly idiosyncratic effort". But his "passionate enthusiasm for his subject survives this film's sugar coating". The critic says that "serious salesmanship is in order" for the film on and off the screen and that Jordan faces an uphill struggle putting across Collins to audiences for whom he is a "little known figure".
Comparing the film somewhat unfavourably to another biographical film Lawrence of Arabi, the critic says that "Michael Collins winds up with a private soap opera and a sometimes detached view of the political events to which he contributed".
Time's critic, Richard Schickel likes the film and admires Jordan but finds it flawed and "less probing, less thoughtful than its director's claims and aspirations for it". The problem is its conventional three act movie structure which is "fine for fiction" but not for more wayward history, "especially when it's in the throes of a revolution".
Schickel concludes that "in a less ambitious context this combination of inventive slackness and intellectual slipperiness would not much matter". But Jordan claims that the film is "an examination of conscience". So "he owes us not to mention the fascinatingly ambiguous figure of Michael Collins rigorous and nuanced honesty instead of the admittedly entertaining fantasia on historical themes that he has delivered".
David Ansen in Newsweek finds the film a "radical departure" from the "fantasy" of Jordan's earlier films but still unsatisfying. "As a movie it's curiously remote."
Unless you come to the film "with strong feelings about its hero, it's unlikely you will be deeply engaged". But at least Jordan has tried "to take the long tragic view instead of merely cooking up easy, partisan emotionalism".
For Newsweek the "most controversial aspect" is the portrayal of Eamon de Valera. "Alan Rickman's bizarre mannered de Valera seems to have been invented by Lewis Carroll it's hard to accept this giant twitchy rabbit as the elder statesman of the Irish Republic."
Neeson "can't single handedly bring this drama to life. The demands of the historical epic form seem to hobble Jordan's imagination ... There's a great story in here but its full harrowing power never blooms", according to Newsweek.
The Los Angeles Times praised the film as a "strong and involving piece of work". It also liked Julia Roberts.
The film has yet to open nation wide. Maybe the fans will agree with US News & World Report that "Michael Collins plays like a Celtic version of Spike Lee's Malcolm X, a sympathetic portrait of an advocate of violence who was killed just as he embraced peaceful methods".
Dying with a gun in your hands is not exactly embracing peaceful methods but sure that's only a detail.